The largest multiple listing service in Michigan has partnered with national property database Realtors Property Resource.
Farmington Hills-based Realcomp II Ltd. has 11,000 members serving Detroit and surrounding communities in Michigan’s "thumb" region. The MLS will feed active and historical listings data to RPR in exchange for access to analytics reports; tax assessment and public property records; records on mortgages, liens and foreclosures; school boundary data; flood maps; aerial and geocoded imagery; and demographic information.
RPR, a subsidiary of the National Association of Realtors, has data licensing agreements in place with MLSs and commercial information exchanges (CIEs) representing about 65 percent of NAR’s 1 million members. In the metro Detroit market, RPR also has an agreement to receive listings data from from Troy-based MiRealSource Inc.
Last month, the Houston Association of Realtors — the second-largest local Realtor association in the country with 24,000 members — signed up to participate in RPR. At the time, RPR said 425 MLSs and CIEs were feeding listings data to the database.
Last Thursday, RPR launched to all 1 million Realtors nationwide, providing a more limited set of tools to members of nonparticipating MLSs. In a statement, Realcomp CEO Karen Kage said the MLS was "very pleased" to feed listings data to RPR "in order to ensure that Realcomp’s Realtor subscribers have full use of all of the technology tools and features that the product offers."
RPR aims to generate revenue by using historical listing data to generate analytics on housing markets and providing those analytics to lenders, Wall Street investors, and government agencies.
RPR has cost NAR nearly $58 million to date and is generating very little revenue despite backers’ initial expectations that the venture would be profitable by this year.
