The Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS) facilitates data transfer between partners in the real estate industry. Creating and improving RETS is a collaborative effort to simplify moving real estate information from system to system and simplify solution development efforts. As RETS usage matures and expands, MLS with geographic overlaps can create data-sharing policies that provide their members a single point of entry to search multiple MLS data sets.
Association/MLS Executives, brokers/agents, or vendors you can learn more of the benefits of RETS here.
Developers creating custom applications and implementing RETS, please refer to the Developer Section.
Announcement for RETS Server Software Developers
In November of 2007, the National Association of REALTORS® implemented the following policy (amended in May of 2009):
The integrity of data is a foundation to the orderly Real Estate market. The Real Estate Transaction Standards (RETS) provides a vendor neutral, secure approach to exchanging listing information between the broker and the MLS. In order to ensure that the goal of maintaining an orderly marketplace is maintained, and to further establish REALTOR® information as the trusted data source, MLS organizations owned and operated by associations of REALTOR® will comply with the RETS standards by December 31st, 2009, and keep current with the standard’s new versions by implementing new releases of RETS within one year from ratification.
A new Compliancy Testing Tool has been developed to help determine if an MLS meets the requirements of this policy. Before this Tool becomes available for general MLS testing, the server software developers will have an opportunity to test their applications for compliancy. The Tool is now available for use by the server developer community. The testing Tool will be available for MLS site testing after developers have had an opportunity to thoroughly test their systems.
To get started, you can access the user guide at:
http://certification.rets.org/help
The link to the Tool login page is:
