Thread: Forget about IDX....use RETS

So much easier. Automated. Simple.

I have a site that i use RETS on.

If you want to check it out or want the address, post back or PM me.

We strictly market New Homes in Boise.

I think RETS is great.

Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS)

I would be interested in seeing your site, I have heard just the opposite, that REITS is a pain in the ***!

I'm sorry, I guess I have been living under a rock..but what is an RETS?

Could you please post an example?

Sorry to all who have been reading this post... i didnt put my site becuase Google has been indexing everything under the sun...

including technical posts i had about my site on other forums...which i didnt need the public to see...

anyway...my site is: www [dot] newhomemarketplace [dot] com

i guess i cant be too hasty is my comments considering i have used IDX recently, but all of my associates are shifting over to RETS....quickly...

with the change of one selection menu in my RETS configuration screen, i adjusted my listings from 50 to 1800 just by changing my criteria...

simple as that...

RETS is what I prefer ....BUT... its not always the best or easiest to work with.....it really all depends on who is providing the RETS feed and their server settings etc. The output looks absolutely no different from any other MLS solution as long as they IDX feed is dumping the same data the displayed information is identical.

What does the IDX markup look like? Is it XML or is it a web service?

RETS is the new standard and we are being forced by our local association of realtors to switch for idx or datalink to rets. So if you are planning on paying anyone any money, choose rets. All providers must switch to rets as mandated by the NAR.

While it looks pretty enough, where are the lead capture systems. No search tool is effective without multiple lead capture abilities.

RETS stands for real estate transaction standard. If you'd have to imagine it just by it's name, you would probabily say it's a standard which most people use. But it's not. The idea was good, but it didn't had clear specification how to implement it, so every administrator which had to work with it implemented as he though it would be better, easier, quicklier.
What's RETS? It's a way to connect with an user and a password to a server and download the informations you need. What would be the differences between RETS and FTP? There are two major ones as i see them : with RETS, as soon as some information is changed, you can download it again, so you'll have the latest information as soon as the change is made(you can download the informations with RETS how many times you want/day). With FTP, the download files are generated once/day, so if a change in information is done today, you'll have it just on the next update, which means tommorow.
The second big difference i see is that you can download just parts of informtions. You don't have to download all commercial homes, you just download a part of them which you don't have, which you want to update, ... On FTP you have to download the file with commercial listings.
But those advantages are only "as an ideea", because even if they are good ideas, usually RETS works very very slowly. It's work very slow, that slow that downloading just a part of information on RETS takes longer than downloading the the file with FTP. Also, it seems that getting your questions answered on RETS from the provider usually takes much longer than the ftp ones