RETS MLS and RETS Client

Question

Folks,

I'm going to work on the Real Project with RETS. I've a document to what actually my manager is looking for. But I seriously I don't know how to start with RETS MLS there's so such documentation of it.

With some R & D, I hardly figure out anything worth.But onething is sure that RETS Client is used to fetch the data from server.then how do we connect to RETS server then?Why there's no such documentation is there.(I really don't know, if there's something)

Now, I'm looking for somebody who could let me know how I can start on this project ? I need information regarding RETS CLIENT and Documentations and A checklist thats to building a website.

Please help me.!!!

Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

Update 2019: RETS has been deprecated, and replaced by RESO Web API: “MLS, brokers and technology partners should put all their effort into converting to the RESO Web API as soon as possible” (Realtyna article). The National Association of Realtors threatened to pull the E&O Insurance of MLSs who don't provide RESO Web API support: “The deadline to implement the RESO Web API was June 30, 2016” (Vendor Alley article).

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Here is a general overview of RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard) with links to documentation to get you started.

RESO (Real Estate Standards Organization) is the organization which develops and maintains RETS.

What is RETS? (link)

"The Real Estate Transaction Standard is a common language spoken by systems that handle real estate information, such as multiple listing services."

"For software developers and for providers of services like IDX sites, RETS means having to write programs to use only one language, the common language of RETS, in order to work with many different MLS systems."

The RESO Developer page is a good starting point to developing with RETS.

For a detailed technical documentation on how to work with the RETS protocol, consult the RETS specification documents.

Many open source tools and programming libraries in many languages are available which handle some of the heavy lifting for you with the RETS protocol. The RESO Tools page has an extensive list.

DMQL (Data Mining Query Language) is the query language used to filter your RETS search criteria.

Consider this query: (ListDate=2013-01-01+),(Price=150000-200000),(Status=ACT)

which retrieves all listings with a Listing Date on or after 01/01/2013, a listing price between $150,000 and $200,000, and a Listing Status of Active.

A good introduction to DMQL can be found here.

Answer 2

If you work with PHP, there's also PHRets. It is a nice and simple library and has a documentation that will help you understand how to get started. You can find the library here and the documentation here.

If you just go through the wiki step by step, you should be able to establish a connection and send queries to the MLS system.

As to what RETS amd RESO are and where you can find further information, the first answer provides you with that.

Answer 3

I've created a CLI to make integration with RETS servers a bit easier that others might find useful. You can use it for exploring the server and searching metadata.

https://github.com/summera/retscli

Hope it is helpful!

Answer 4

I recommend using librets. Here is the developer guide with a number of language examples (c++,c#,java,perl,php,python,ruby).

I have only used librets to do searches against a RETS server and getting photos, which the above guide covers how to do both of these.

What kinds of thing are you wanting to do with RETS?