FBS Flex MLS
For those of you who attended the NAR Midyear Legislative meetings this spring in Washington DC, you may well understand that NAR Executive Committee passed a modification to the IDX model rules and regulations.
Specifically, they altered the component of the rule that refers to the rights of Franchise Organizations to receive an IDX feed. Under the old policy, Franchise Organizations would receive a feed of all IDX listings. Under the new policy, a Franchise Organization may only receive IDX listing if an MLS broker as Opted In to sharing their listings with a particular franchise.
This caused a lot of questions and created a technical challenge to the MLS who is supplying the IDX data to Franchises.
- How to selectively send listings of brokers who have opted-in (rather than the entire feed).
- How to send the opted in listings to one or more franchise organizations and not to others.
On Thursday, June 9th, FBS announced on their blog that they now support their MLS customers with compliance with this rule., and we believe that they are the first MLS system provider to deliver a solution.
From the FBS post…
Alas, despite many questions and concerns with this new policy, our customers needed a solution to comply with the rule. What we decided was to modify the syndication options in flexmls to support broker opt-in for franchise sites in combination with IDX. This approach has the benefit of both tracking the broker opt-ins by individual franchise site and also providing the MLS a way to provide a RETS feed of only those listings from opted-in brokers.
For more information on this new feature, check out this MLS Admin video tutorial and this broker video tutorial (the clear direction and calming voice on the video is our very own Kendra O’Brien, who quickly got up to speed on this complex topic to produce the tutorials). We’re hopeful this new feature will help our MLS customers comply with the new policy, if they must.
For our customers who find this valuable, thanks goes to James Ridley and Troy Davisson for the guidance and development of the new features and, of course, Kendra for producing the tutorials. Given the tight time-frame and complexity of figuring out a solution to this new NAR decision, I’m very proud of the response our team provided.
