Foreword

Mike Wurzer's post leaves me reflecting upon my own impossibly short tenure with the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO, née RETS Working Group).  Less than two years ago, my quest for a better understanding of RETS led me to the fateful Austin "Turning Point" Meeting, at which Mark Lesswing cast a new die for the slapdash Standard.  My involvement since has been marked by the excellent work done through the Schema Workgroup, a vain attempt to improve the Query mechanism, professional complications leaving me absent, and the eventual acceptance that sometimes the pace of committee work can be rendered so slow as to be imperceptible.

An uninformed onlooker might ask, "How difficult can it be to meaningfully document the exchange of a piece of real property?"  The genuine answer lay somewhere alongside that of "How long is the coast of Britain?"  That is to say, "It depends."  If you are measuring the coast of Britain with a 1-kilometer ruler, for example, it's relatively easy to find its length (12,429km); repeating the exercise with a micrometer might suggest to the practitioner that it were infinite and seemingly immeasurable.

And so this is the challenge to RESO: not to document the infinite, but to agree on the unit of measure and the method by which that measurement is recorded.  It's definitely not as easy in practice as it reads on paper... particularly when over a dozen stakeholders have already been using their rulers and ledgers for the better of two decades.

And then the lions came...

Just as all the parties were struggling to develop the universal measure, the lions came over the hill.  Thanks to Mr. Lesswing, I've had the grand opportunity to dine with the inimitable Mr. Chee on two occasions:  Although I'd already heard the speech, its intent was better clarified by Bill in person.  As with this digital revolution of MLSes in the former decade, the members of RETS found themselves to be the dogs fighting over a bone when Google, Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo!, and Vast indicated that they were working on a unified standard for the advertisement of real property in their various online catalogs.  Bottom line: Innovation is impatient; or, with more gravity, "He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator." (Francis Bacon)

Syndication, or at least the trivial replication of Listing data, had long been my cause in RESO.  While the Schema workgroup had progressed in wonderful ways, the reality is that RETS as a transport is still antiquated, painful for the consumer, broken, and remarkably inefficient for this simple (but 90% use-case) task.  RETS 2.0 (r.i.p.) did little to improve the usability of the data and, quite possibly, made the transport even more burdensome for this purpose.  That's when I, along with members from the CRT and gathering interest from FBS, conceived AtomRED.

The task was simple: gut everything you don't need and try to publish the data in the most Open way -- end the cathedral, open the bazaar.

Unfortunately, my time being what it is and the fact that RESO exists as a 99% voluntary organization, AtomRED has yet to get its fair consideration -- most of the members have jobs, and those jobs probably have something to do with RETS, so anything not-RETS must be bad.  Although it has its share of imperfections (it's still fatter than I'd like), it's a far leaner and easier transport mechanism for the consumer than anything else on the market today.

Hopefully, my schedule will clear up a bit over the next year and I'll be able to champion AtomRED further into the market.

Advice for the new kids

The next meeting in Scottsdale will bring about the first full-term Board for RESO and a remarkably different cast from that which formed the organization a mere year ago.  I declined a Board seat as my professional pursuits have paralleled Mr. Garner's into the IT world; Mike Wurzer steps down as RESO Chairman, and a large portion of the Board will turn over for various reasons.  My hope is that a revitalized Board also revitalizes the RESO's purpose.

My unsolicited (and possibly unexpected) suggestions:

• Don't try to sell RETS to the Broker.  The Broker is busy, doesn't care, probably doesn't understand, and ultimately doesn't decide.  Sell RETS to the data-consuming vendors.  They and their prospective-customers will generate the viral advertising you need.
• Rescind the previously-accepted RETS 2.0.  It was never completed, is causing market confusion, and hurting your cause:  After five years, the donkey will figure out that it's never getting the carrot.
• Work on solving the customer's problem, not your own.  The Syndication consortium will move on its own if you keep trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

Adieu

I will probably be out of RESO for some time as my professional pursuits continue to deviate from the crux of its purpose, but I will always deeply appreciate the friends and professional relationships I've made being part of RESO.  Like it or not, we're all in this together and you reap what you sow.