On August 2, 2006, the RETS Community voted by super majority to approve the RETS2 Service specification.
The RETS2 Service is the result of two years of workgroups, research and development, and RETS community outreach. It includes the following features:
- Web Service access using SOAP and MTOM, with a WSDL file that can be used by standard toolkits to quickly generate a RETS2 client interface.
- Increased emphasis on security using Web Services Security, with planned support for SAML and X.509.
- A simplified, SQL-like query language, RQL, that is easy to parse and resolves ambiguities found in DMQL.
- Simplified metadata, including Vocabularies designed to make client query generation easier and ResourceLists
that advertise formats, objects and display information for all a RETS provider's capabilities. - Definitions for WellKnown Payloads that extend beyond standard MLS data to include the rest of the
Real Estate Transaction Lifecycle (such as Transaction Management Payloads, NRDS Payloads, and Public Records).
RETS2's design also allows for the transportation of documents from other standards bodies, such as MISMO and OSCRE/Pisces. - Support for custom search and update formats, enabling a RETS provider to support custom xml as well as archives, multi-media, JSON, or other formats.
- Extensibility, making it easy for RETS providers to extend WellKnown payloads and metadata where necessary to include custom data.
The RET2 Documents can be found here.