The following abstract was submitted to the 2018 American Real Estate Society conference this spring in Bonita Springs, Florida. The aim is to focus on the infrastructure and transport areas for a new protocol called Real Estate Transport Protocol or RETP for short. I previously gave a talk at ARES back in 2012 on a request-response protocol by the name of Multiple Listing Service Network Protocol (MLSN). Future papers will focus on the messaging and security areas for both RETP and MLSN.
Title: Real Estate Transport Protocol: A Hub-and-Spoke Messaging System for Next Generation Multiple Listing Services
Current multiple listing services (MLS) operate as isolated systems due to tight coupling to their local markets and a lack of interoperability for provisioning listings outside of their local areas. Moreover, these legacy MLSs act as controlled gateways eliminating a network effect for maximizing marketability of listings to non-local buyers. This paper proposes a new, distributed messaging protocol called Real Estate Transport Protocol (RETP) for resolving weaknesses and inefficiencies present in today’s legacy MLSs. RETP provides a fire-and-forget messaging transport over assigned Internet port 32811. Implementing a virtualized infrastructure, RETP’s messaging protocol creates a hub-and-spoke network topology for provisioning listing messages to a centralized hub from connected nodes acting as network spokes similar to FedEx’s package shipping model. The results of this research offer three messaging use cases: node to hub, node to hub to node, and then finally, node to hub to multiple nodes. Immediate benefits realized from the implementation of RETP include, but not limited to, network scalability, data redundancy, and the potential of a national multiple listing service.
--Corey
