When 18 North Texas MLSs merged their MLS companies to form the North Texas Real Estate Information Services, Inc. (NTREIS,) one of the nation's largest MLS services, the idea was to share data and lower costs through unification. Centered in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, a top ten national relocation destination, smaller MLSs would be better equipped to serve agents in burgeoning bedroom communities such as Plano and Southlake, not to mention agents whose clients were moving from one community to another within the Metroplex. All major independent and franchise brokers ramped up their relocation teams and found themselves establishing offices and running to serve clients well over a 75-mile radius.

But implementing a new legacy MLS system to 13,000 users who used different input fields proved a nightmare, as problems such as user error coupled with inadequate training, support and phone lines into the legacy system frustrated users.

Agents loudly blamed the MLS information system service provider - Moore Data. Moore Data blamed agent input and the nearly impossible task of integrating 18 notions of what should be the right data fields.

But that was ages ago - back in early 1999.

Today, NTREIS and its agents are long past the conversion and have since added parallel Internet services for easier access, three public search sites, as well as lead generation tools and other products and services, making it one of the most progressive MLS organizations in the nation.

Now MLSs have a new way to share their data with other MLSs and their members - without merging, frustrating their agents, or buying new legacy hardware, and the cost for the new service can be rolled into membership dues.

WyldFyre, a Homestore company, has created a Web-based service that allows listings to be shared between consenting MLS organizations. The debut of this concept is the Southern California MLSAlliance which will connect over 60,000 agents to listings searches supplied by SoCalMLS, Combined LA/Westside Multiple Listing Service, CRIS Net Regional MLS, i-Tech MLS, Multi-Regional Multiple Listing Service, Inc. and the Orange Coast Association of REALTORS®.

Southern California MLSs had provided open access to neighboring MLSs and their members without having to join, but "what was missing was a common platform from which all the listings in a market area could be viewed," explains Russ Bergeron, general manager of SoCalMLS. “Today, when one of our customers needs to search a city on the border between two or more MLSs, they can now find all the properties in that city with one search. And, since it is Web-based, no additional software is required.”

In Southern California where there are long stretches of coastline, (Orange County has over 80 miles) and a customer wants an oceanview property, the search could take the agent through several MLSs which have to be logged onto separately. This is time-consuming.

MLSAlliance gathers information from all participating systems and puts it into a common database, but the information remains native to its original MLS system, so when an agent searches, it will search across all systems simultaneously.

"With MLS information now on the Internet, the consumer is often more well-informed than the agents are," says Dan Musso, president of Wyldfyre. "That's why MLSs are interested in this technology. It gives them a way to remain independent while providing their agents with a better ability to provide better information than the consumer can get for themselves."

The problem is getting MLS executives together in the same room to discuss it.

"It's getting them together and getting them to agree to go forward that is the most difficult part," says Musso. "from a political perspective, you know? They don't work together a lot. If we had to set up a user group to define functionality, they all have to agree on the changes, or the changes don't occur."

The Southern California MLSAlliance took over a year and a half to put together, but Musso hopes that future sales will go a little easier, now that other MLS executives can see how things are going in Southern California.

"We are looking at other markets," says Musso. "It is also in Northern California as well. It is a natural for large metro areas like New England, New Jersey and Florida where several MLSs share long borders."

Published: May 20, 2002

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