When my husband and I bought our first house, we had professional movers for the first time. They got to work quickly and made their way through the apartment with little supervision. It was great! But then as I unpacked boxes at our house, I opened a box to find a full wastebasket that had been next to my desk. Packed carefully, trash that should have been taken care of in another state, but there it was, facing me in my new house.
An MLS conversion is a move on a much larger scale. Accumulated data and rules must move from one home to another, and each step of that process is important. At FBS, we’ve been refining our conversion process over several decades and many shifts in technology. Since 2013, it’s been my honor to work with the customer success and customer onboarding teams as they led around 100 MLSs through this move—packing, moving and settling into their new technology home.
Ownership
The movers who packed that trashcan had a job to do that was disconnected from the outcome. They would never see me or my stuff again, so there was no reason to think past the delivery of the boxes. Ownership is baked into everything we do at FBS. As a 100% employee-owned company, we approach projects with sustainability and long-term partnership in mind. During a conversion where multiple Realtor® Associations were joining together in a regional system, creative users had found 67 variations on how to spell one highly used county, as it was an open text field. We worked in partnership with the MLS to clean up that list, making sure the data was accurate and ready to use for years to come.
Flexibility on a Foundation of Standards
We serve markets across the United States and a handful of international MLSs. We understand that the fields that are critical to one market may be completely absent in another. Our process has been defined and refined to identify those key fields and preserve the specificity each market needs to work. From a tourist market’s Parking Spot property type to the Mile Marker field in the Florida Keys, we are here to meet the needs of the market without flattening that valuable data.
That flexibility is made possible thanks to a strong foundation in data standards. FBS has helped to define and refine industry standards fueled by real-world examples from our many conversions. We have daily experience with the value in data standards for communicating across MLSs and through data distribution. We use a core set of standard fields to help all of our converting MLSs benefit from standards and best practices.
As FBS continues to convert new MLSs, we hold ourselves to that same standard of ownership. We look at each conversion project like we’re the ones who’ll be living with it once the truck pulls away.
For more information, visit https://wearefbs.com/.Â
