RISMEDIA, Nov. 11, 2008-America’s largest MLS has just renewed its Neighborhood and School Data License with Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions’ (FNRES’) Broker Agent Products division. FNRES is a division of Fidelity National Financial, Inc., a Fortune 500 provider of products, services and technology solutions to the financial and real estate industries.
Based in Rockville, Maryland, Metropolitan Regional Information Systems (MRIS) is the nation’s largest MLS, with more than 53,000 members, daily listings of over 95,000 properties and more than $29 billion in sales for 2008.
According to John Hensley, SVP and General Manager of FNRES’ Broker Agent Products and Data Aggregation, “MRIS will take advantage of our newest, most enhanced Neighborhood and School Reports product release. It provides more tools and better display of the raw data, and uses new and detailed graphs to facilitate greater analysis by users.”
Demand by homebuyers for information about surrounding neighborhoods, especially school profiles, has prompted data feeds to increase their capabilities. FNRES Broker Agent Products division’s neighborhood and school reports solution allows the MLSs and brokerages running its raw data to add these popular updates into their application.
FNRES Broker Agent Products offers two packages to provide this service. One is for companies that want raw data they can integrate into the applications they have built. The other is for those who want to integrate everything by dropping the FNRES Application Programming Interface (API) into their product.
MRIS has subscribed to FNRES’ Neighborhood and School feed service for several years.
According to MRIS Director of Product Management Jeff Jennings, whose responsibilities include data integration, “This is becoming the hot add-on for Web searches. If the old catch-phrase was ‘location, location, location,’ I would say at least one ‘location’ has been replaced with ‘education.’ Schools are now a huge indicator of neighborhood quality, and we rely on the FNRES feed to have current accounting of that characteristic.”
“Whatever the size, shape, or appearance of a real estate Web site,” Hensley said, “its life-blood is the listings and raw data that flow through it. Our task is to make sure that the data feed is as rich and fluid as humanly possible. The industry’s health depends upon it.”
The Neighborhood and School Data provided by FNRES includes current information covering housing trends and statistics, demographics, economics, schools, environment and quality of life. The data is provided at the Zip code, city, county and national level for comparison.
For more information regarding FNRES’ Broker Agent Products division, including licensing of the Neighborhood and School Data, contact Larry Ross, General Manager Data Aggregation, at 949-681-4793 or larry.ross@fnres.com.
More information about FNF can be found at www.fnf.com.
