(Excerpts taken from the Oversight Committee "Talking Points")
What is being developed?
IRES and Metrolist are expanding the system of sharing of their listing data beyond what was developed under the CCM Agreement (Colorado Cooperative MLS). What is being proposed will permit a subscriber of either MLS to both input listings and access all listing from either MLS system.
Why is this being done?
Many brokers in the IRES and Metrolist areas belong to both systems, pay duplicate fees, input listings twice, learn two different MLS systems and deal with different sets of rules and policies. The expanded data exchange will give brokers along the Front Range of Colorado a larger pool of listings and potential buyers for their clients and customers, create healthy competition between Metrolist and IRES that will lead to more and better services, as well as the opportunity to reduce costs.
How does it benefit me?
Each and every subscriber will have the ability to access all of the listings throughout the current service areas of Metrolist and IRES. Second, users will no longer have to input listings twice, as they will only have to input listing data once to have it available to all 20,000+ users of the two MLSs. This will result in an MLS of choice for agents.
12 comments:
I wanted to be one of the first to thank Metrolist and Ires for sharing information. I do a lot of market analysis for banks in the areas of Keenesburg, Hudson, Roggen, and Fort Lupton. Often, I find I am searching the combined listings to find comparable properties. Thanks for making my job easier as well as adding accuracy to the work I do!
That sounds great! Metrolist is so insanely outdated and cubersome to use.
I hope that this will eventually morph into a statewide MLS.
Wonderful idea, I'm all for saving the double membership dues. . .question: will we still be able to access all the features each site offers (e.g. contract writing on IRES, cma's on Metrolist, etc.)?
Marion,
That's a good question. Each system will remain separate - we will not be combining them. You will be able to choose the system with the functions that best fit your needs, or you can still be a subscriber to both. Thanks for your question!
Are the two public MLS search websites run by Metrolist (recolorado.com) and IRES (coloproperty.com) going to be combined. Or is the public going to be able to search for listings from both MLSs through each public search website. That's why I enter listings seperately on metrolist and IRES because I believe the public doesn't know the difference between the two websites. coloproperty.com says it's for northern colorado, but recolorado.com makes the public think that it covers the entire front range. And if you search in a search engine for Colorado MLS recolorado.com comes up at the top in most cases. Just my thoughts.
Marc,
Thanks for your question. We plan to continue to operate ColoProperty and there has been no discussion regarding combining public sites. We also have not determined if shared listings can be posted on our respective public sites. If it turns out that we do, the "Northern Colorado" reference on ColoProperty may be changed to more accurately reflect the geographic area that is covered.
Thank you for setting up this blog. What a good discussion. I for one am anxious to access listings on Metrolist in more detail through the IRES system. Although I have trained in Metrolist, I find it difficult to use. I appreciate the cooperation by both MLS companies. This will benefit all agents and clients. I look forward to seeing what will develop from this cooperation.
I just want to also state that I think it is great - I dont like the organization of Metrolist, love IRESIS (except that it doesnt work on a mac). But definitely agree the CMAs on metrolist are better. It may be worth looking at Ires..
IRES does work on a Mac; with non-Intel Macs you can use Virtual PC (the best version I found is the latest running with Windows XP) but it is slow. With Intel Macs you can use Parallels Desktop, it is MUCH faster than Virtual PC. With both Virtual PC and Parallels Desktop you can renew your Sentrilock card.
The bigger issue is that I think IRES needs to move away from only working with Internet Explorer; this is stiffling for innovation, limits customer (we, the Realtors) choice and I suspect will someday expose IRES to some virus attack.
Hi Richard, it’s good to hear from you and to learn that the new Parallels desktop works well with Macs. Thanks for that info.
Cross browser support is something we would like to have as well. As we create new functionality our developers aim to write code that conforms to the standards of the web. Unfortunately, standards are a tricky subject when it comes to web browsers. There are dozens of browsers on multiple different platforms and most of them implement the standards a bit differently. This puts us in a tricky position, we can spend our resources testing and working around many of the issues with all these varieties of browsers. Or, we can standardize on the most popular platform and spend our resources on functionality that all of our users will benefit from. We regret that this inconveniences some users, but it clearly benefits the majority.
The analysis of our statistics from ColoProperty.com, a site which can be accessed with any browser, has shown that over 90% of the users access the site with Microsoft Windows using Internet Explorer. Only 4.6% are using the Apple Safari browser (stats from August 2007). You'll find similar statistics for other popular internet sites.
How do you feel about the new data sharing? Is it helping your business?
Belonging to 1 or both of the MLS systems will also depend on which web sites the listings get propagated to. Like the discussion of recolorado.com and coloproperites.com Are there lists of sites that have data updated by each of the MLS systems? Are there lists of sites that extract data from each of the MLSs?
Thanks for a great and improving product,
-Stuart
Right now IRES sends listings to ColoProperty, Realtor.com (if you are a Realtor), and, if requested by Broker/Owners we provide data feeds for their IDX sites. However, we are exploring other avenues to help brokers maximize exposure and marketing, so stay tuned!
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