XML is Helping to Solve Real Estate Problem

For the real estate industry, the Web's advantages appear to be outweighed by a big disadvantage: there's just too much information.  How can buyers look through every listing available to find what they are looking for with as little effort as possible?  How can buyers search across many different listings?

"The web's larger impact will be to streamline the adjunct transactions (around a sale of real estate) such as finance, title, and insurance." --Tim Popin

What a buyer really wants to do is specify exactly what they are looking for and get back a list of houses that fit the description. Such criteria might be "home, less than $640,000, on more than 3 acres of land," or "San Francisco AND 94101 AND Ocean View" to find all of the listings in San Francisco county with a zip code of 94101 that included an ocean view.

The Problem

Presently, real estate properties are "listed" in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), a directory that has become the standard source of information for real estate agents.  Unfortunately, there is no standardized MLS format, and no two realtors offer the service in exactly the same way.

Each Board of Realtors (several hundred in the US) uses its own legacy-based MLS software.  These MLS systems cannot exchange data, even when using products from the same vendor.  Also, each Board specifies which information belongs in a listing, customizing it to fit local needs.  Thus, to date, there has been no central location to obtain listings and no easy way to interface with these services or the information managed by them.

In recent years, there have been several attempts to provide centralized web sites for large numbers of listings.   However, there is an intense political debate over having a single company centralize all this data.

The Solution

A new direction is in the works, and it involves XML as a means of standardizing this information and providing easier and wider access to it.

A company called OpenMLS has collaborated with John Petit of 4thWORLD Telecom to develop the Real Estate Listing Markup Language (RELML). OpenMLS offers a complete suite of applications, called the OpenMLS Listing Management System, which is used to aggregate legacy listings, generate their XML counterparts, and then index and update this information. The company has also developed XSearch!, a stand-alone search engine product that can be used with RELML or any other DTD. We'll be looking at the DTD later in more depth as well as the system applications that use this DTD. The result for end users is a simple, Web-based search interface for residential listings

One of the advantages of the RELML-based scheme is that there need be no single central site. XML-based listings can be distributed across the web. Portal sites need only crawl the servers where the information is published. Individual portals can create their own interfaces to the information they choose to index.

Let's take a closer look at OpenMLS and this application.

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