What is RESO?

What is RESO?

Real Estate Standards Organization, or RESO, was incorporated in November 2011 as an independent, not-for-profit trade organization that was previously a section of the National Association of REALTORS®.

RESO actively develops, adopts and implements open and accepted data standards and processes across all real estate transactions. RESO provides an environment for the development and implementation of data standards and processes that facilitate software innovation, ensures portability, eliminates redundancies and obtains maximum efficiencies for all parties participating in real estate transactions.

RESO has more than 700 active members, including NAR, multiple-listing services, real estate associations, brokerages and industry technology providers.

Who can Make use of RESO standards

The primary players who help create and use RESO standards are the MLS, Brokers and Technology Partners to MLS/Brokers and the Real Estate Industry.

Why are standards important to the real estate industry?

Standards remove ambiguity and incompatibility across different computer systems within and outside organizations as well as between business partners resulting in more consistent and higher quality data among those that support those standards.   In short, standards make it easier for programmers to handle real estate information from many different entities as it forces consistency when exchanging data between different systems. Without RESO standards, programmers would spend more time dealing with many different types of systems, fixing more bugs and correcting erroneous data.

What are the concerns that drive the formation of the standards?

Creativity, efficiency, quality and cost control are the major factors that drive the formation of technology standards. RESO Standards also help level the playing field which enables smaller business entities to participate and compete with larger institutions.

How can I help increase adoption of the standards?

Joining and supporting RESO is always a good first step to help increase the adoption of real estate standards. All real estate entities should also ensure that their technology solutions utilize RESO standards when and where appropriate.

What current standards does RESO publish?

RESO currently publishes standard documents for the Web API, Data Dictionary, the Universal Prioperty ID and RETS 1x protocols (soon to be expired) . Details for all of these standards can be found under the “Resource” menu in reso.org.

What is the Data Dictionary?

The Data Dictionary serves as a guideline for a North American standard for the fields and lookups in Multiple Listing Service (MLS) databases. An MLS does not need to support every field or lookup in the Data Dictionary, but if it does have a given field in the Data Dictionary it should to support that data item as defined in the Data Dictionary.

How does the Data Dictionary get implemented for general consumption?

The MLS, broker and their vendor or technology partner must convert their local MLS Data (metadata) to be Data Dictionary compliant. Once the data dictionary is implemented within a MLS it will be available to the Broker and Technology communities.

What is metadata?

Metadata is data about data. It is descriptive information about a particular data set including how it is formatted, and when and by whom it was collected.

What is the Web API?

The goal of this standard is to provide a more open data approach using the widely-adopted RESTful (REpresentational State Transfer) technology in use by many industries today. RESO’s move toward a RESTful standard is to encourage and promote access to real estate information directly from web, mobile, social and other web based applications.

What is OData?

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is an application-level protocol for interacting with data via RESTful web services. The protocol supports the description of data models and the editing and querying of data according to those models. The RESO Web API uses OData as its underlying protocol which serves as a set of fundamental building blocks.

What OData version does RESO Support?

Compatible RESO OData Transport client and server applications MUST be implemented according to the OData V4 standard specification

How is Security handled in the RESO Web API?

Security (e.g Authentication and Authorization) is not explicitly addressed in the Web API specification. However, it is addressed in a partner document labeled RETS Web API Security. Please See the “RETS Web API Security” document located in RESO Web API