Real Estate and RETS
Development and Programming
I’m in the process of researching solutions for a real estate site that requires accessing listings from the local MLS database. Typically this has been done with IDX but there is a new standard for doing this called RETS. This will be the first realtor in our area to integrate MLS listings and I think that other realtors will follow. Would a RETS module be feasible for EE? Anyone use RETS? (disclaimer: I am not a programer)
The Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS) is the open standard for exchanging real estate transaction information. Consisting of a transaction specification and a standard Extensible Markup Language (XML) Document Type Definition (DTD), RETS is being implemented by many real estate industry leaders in their next generation of real estate information systems.
It would certainly be feasible. Especially if you are just talking about something that is able to take an XML document from a RETS server and display it within EE templates. You could even possibly just do it in a plugin depending on how much functionality you wanted. It would take some time though. The Pro Network would likely have some people who could help you there.
Jamie
This is something I am actively researching. I don’t know if any existing solutions out there exist that will tie RETS and EE or make life easier. If I discover something, I’ll post results here.
We have a new real estate product we just finished a few months ago that has a fairly comprehensive management backend, including an extremely robust IDX import capability that supports multiple MLS sources. An example implementation is here:
For best results, find a listing with the “Alco Realty” logo, those company listings have a few more bells and whistles than listings shown from other brokers.
Note this is NOT an EE site, it’s built on a custom Rails app we developed. I’ll be glad to post some screenshots of the administrative side if anyone’s interested.
As a recent convert to EE, I’ve been kicking around the idea of building a EE module to do basically the same thing. We’d want to do more than just display listings, though… there are a whole host of things brokers & agents want to be able to do that we’d need to think through. I’ve got a pretty good idea what those things are, what I mean is we’d need to think through how to best address them in a way that makes sense within the EE framework.
Trying to do this with all of the different flavors of IDX out there would be a pain, but RETS should be easier - at least in theory. Unfortunately, many of the listing services have yet to get on board despite a mandate to implement RETS this year.
Anyway, I would be curious to know if there’s any demand out there for this sort of thing for EE. Thoughts?
Brandon
My company would be very interested in such functionality. We are researching the current tools available to help us tie RETS data into websites. I have some ideas but none of them are terribly simple to do and require a fair amount of custom work. So, yes, I would like to second the motion. All in favor?
We could use such integration as well. Has there been any development on this front?