Don't Fear the RPR

NAR's New Tool Rolls Out Later This Year - After That, Everything Changes
(Part One of Two)

By Andrew Kantor, Editor and Information Manager, Virginia Association of REALTORS® (VAR)

Arizona REALTOR® Magazine - April 2010

This is the first part in a two-part story about the REALTORS® Property Resource. View part two from the May issue of Arizona REALTOR® Magazine.

This is the first part in a two-part story about the REALTORS® Property Resource. Part two will be included in the May issue of Arizona REALTOR® Magazine.

Later this year, NAR will be rolling out the REALTORS® Property Resource — potentially one of the most important and useful real estate resources to come along this decade.

It might very well change your business.

The RPR is a huge and growing set of public and private databases, combined in a clean, friendly interface. With a few mouse clicks (literally), it can tell REALTORS® all that is knowable about any property in the United States.

That’s any property — for sale or not. Tax records, neighborhood data, structural information, ownership information... the list goes on. For a profession whose bread and butter is property, it’s an incredible tool.

But let’s get this up front: There is some controversy about RPR. While just about everyone agrees that it will be an amazing tool for REALTORS®, there are concerns about how it will impact MLSs (and thus local REALTOR® associations), about how the data will be used and even about whether it’s too good a tool. We’ll get to that in part two.

But first, a look at RPR and what you’ll be able to do with it.

What It Is

RPR is a national database of every property in these United States. Correction — RPR is a set of databases that NAR has spent $25 million to put together in a single beautiful package.

Pick a property address — 123 Main Street or whatever. There are plenty of information sources (free or otherwise) that tell you about that property: tax records from the county, school reports from private services like GreatSchools, demographics from Nielsen and so on. You could even look up maps of airport traffic patterns or find out where the nearest grocery store is.

Smart REALTORS® have been doing that sort of thing for a while. They access free public sources for some information, and they (or their broker or firm) have paid to use private databases for more.

Now comes RPR, which simplifies that entire process of data searching. It takes all those sources — public or private — and combines them into a single product with a single access point. Then it lets every REALTOR® in the country use it, free, because it’s owned by REALTORS®.

As Jeff Young, RPR’s senior vice president of operations puts it, RPR gives brokerages information that many consumers already have. “Consumers have tremendous access to data,” he said. “REALTORS® are limited by geography, MLS features, brokerage features — but a consumer has access to everything.”

The goal of RPR is “to put a resource in [NAR] members’ hands that’s equal or better than any in the world.”

Easy Does It

Simplicity is the key. One click and you can know all that is knowable about any property in the U.S., for sale or not.

That includes sales, mortgage, tax and assessment data, liens, and permits (courtesy of Fidelity’s LPS Real Estate Group, the data aggregator to which NAR is paying $11 million to license the core property information in RPR). It includes neighborhood information such as zoning, environmental issues and community demographics — think census data. It includes psychographic data — the kind of information that’s collected by people using those supermarket discount cards, like spending habits. It includes information about public and private elementary, middle and high schools — hard data and even reviews from parents. It includes distressed-property records.

It can show a property’s sales and financing activity chart, so you can see a property’s 10-year history at a glance — when it was put on the market, when it sold and for how much, when it was refinanced.

And that’s just for starters. RPR plans to expand its repertoire of information, adding new databases as it assesses member needs and creates relationships with data providers. And the data potential runs across the board.

“A Chicago company has floor plans of every condo in Chicago,” Young says, by way of example. “And there’s a company in Virginia that does vacant land feasibility reports.” Both could be integrated. Also being considered: homeowners association information and condo documents — and more. RPR is flexible.

It’s also more than just a data dump, although viewing details about a single property will certainly be important. RPR goes further. It includes tools that let you search a region of your choice based on whichever criteria you want — and then compare properties and markets.

And “region of your choice” means anything from an entire metropolitan area, to a specific ZIP code (or codes), to school districts, to an area you define by drawing on a map. After all, RPR may not know about unofficial neighborhoods like Raleigh Court in Roanoke. But your clients will.

The data are presented as text, as tables, as charts or on a map, depending on the kind of information you’re looking at. For example, one feature lets you create “heat maps” of a region based on the criteria you choose. Another lets you color it based on age distribution — pink and red for older residents, blues for younger. Ditto for income, housing density and other factors.

Warning: Be careful and remember to keep fair housing law in mind when using these kinds of features, whether through RPR or another service. With great data access comes great responsibility.

Getting the picture? RPR lets you view all this information in a clear and useful way. Even if you never dove into a public or commercial database to dig up information, RPR has enough data — and is easy enough to use — that you’ll be tempted, like the bear who went over the mountain, to see what there is to see. (Answer: mountains of data.)

Think about what you can do with that information not only from a client-service standpoint, but as a marketing tool. What’s selling where and to whom? RPR can tell you.

But wait. There’s more.

RPR can integrate — in fact, is designed to integrate — with your local MLS, where it can take that information and integrate it in amazing ways.

All Together Now

RPR is a national property information service, but it’s definitively not an MLS. It does not list prices and compensation offers for a property. That’s the job of your MLS, and RPR execs are clear that it will not offer that information. Instead, RPR wants to add value to the MLS by integrating its data.

Although RPR has its own website where you can use it (narrpr.com), its preferred delivery method will be through your MLS.

The plan, basically, is this: Each of the 900 or so MLSs in the country can enter an agreement with RPR. Then the MLSs will give RPR access to their data, so RPR can a) integrate it into the various data views it offers REALTORS® and b) use it to calculate property values — more on that in a moment.

This is important: MLSs can decide who (beyond their members) gets to see their information and how much of it.

By default, only an MLS’s members will have access, but each MLS can opt to share specific data with other groups. For example, one could opt to share everything with a neighboring MLS as part of a data-sharing agreement. Or it could opt to share REALTOR® comments with everyone.

In exchange, RPR will, for want of a better term, put that MLS on steroids. It will be seamlessly integrated with the MLS — no separate account or login required. Users will be able to view a property, and with one click see all the RPR information about it, including MLS off-market and active data from across the country, provided other MLSs have agreed to share it.

Participating MLSs will also get their tax and foreclosure records free, thanks to RPR’s purchase of current data as well as archives going back 10 years.

And if an MLS declines to participate? No worries. Because RPR is an NAR product, it is free and available to NAR members. If an MLS doesn’t opt in, says Young, “Members in those markets will be able to access [RPR] through narrpr.com and get all the RPR data — except the MLS data.” NAR built the RPR database “to give its members access to integrated parcel-centric data,” Young says. Whether it does that through an MLS “is a secondary issue.”

(For more on what happens if your MLS doesn’t participate in RPR, see the sidebar, “If Your MLS Says ‘No’”.)

Mona Steen, RPR’s senior vice president for industry relations explained at VAR’s February Get Active conference that she expects most MLSs to join once all the details of the contract are worked out. “If the members want it, the MLSs will participate because the members will drive it.”

And, she says, the members will want it.

Christine Todd, CEO of the Northern Virginia Association of REALTORS® (NVAR), agrees. By giving REALTORS® — and only REALTORS® — this information, RPR will “make sure they are the single-source reference point for the transaction,” she says. “That will ultimately result in their being more valuable when they serve their customers.”

Reprinted from Commonwealth Magazine April 2010 with permission of the Virginia Association of REALTORS®. Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.