MLS News

As of January 1, 2008, MLS Areas will be discontinued for use with CBR Tempo^TM. These somewhat arbitrary and frequently controversial area identifiers served the industry well in earlier days when boundaries were smaller and more clearly defined.

But with today's advanced technology, an expanding real estate market and REALTOR® demand for frequent mapping updates, it was decided that the time has arrived to progress to electronic mapping. Our new and recently installed PinPoint mapping system, custom designed for your Tempo MLS system, will enable us to do this.

The decision to eliminate MLS Areas was also due in part to the fact that these special MLS Areas required the use of customized maps that have become overly expensive and time-consuming to produce/update.

While Rand McNally, our customized map vendor, provided a quality product, area boundaries were frequently revised or eliminated and cost to produce a new map book each time a change was made was prohibitive. Therefore, the map books were outdated shortly after each printing.

Your new PinPoint electronic mapping will allow you to search in areas of your own choosing rather than having to depend on areas created by MLS many years ago.

PinPoint even allows for the use of the standard Rand McNally grid and map page systems that will not change from year to year and is recorded in the CBR Tempo^TM system.

And graphical mapping functionality was recently added to PinPoint.

Members can now use any Rand McNally map book from their favorite retail outlet, have current mapping knowledge from the latest, available publication and your electronic updates will be as frequent as technology allows.

Your searches can be designed more easily around your buyers' requirements now rather than being subject to MLS areas and their defined boundary lines.

Expanded opportunities will exist for searches by using zip code, city, municipality, school district, taxing district, subdivision or any other combination of criteria that you create for finding property in MLS that meets the needs of your clients.

The PinPoint mapping system is working towards the ability to include these criteria and the ability to save user created searches before the end of this year and before the elimination of areas.

What this means to you:
Custom searches will fail if Area remains a search criterion after areas are eliminated. However, do not simply eliminate Area as a search criterion without replacing it with another search criterion, as doing so will cause your custom search to return results from the entire MLS rather than a specific geographical area.

Thus, prior to the elimination of areas you MUST make modifications to any existing custom searches that you have on the CBR Tempo^TM system.

Alternative Search Options
There are MANY alternative search techniques that can and must be utilized when areas are eliminated.

For example, a search for area PO (Powell) can still be accomplished without the actual AREA PO. You can search by zip code (43065), County (Delaware), Municipality (Powell), City (Powell), School (Olentangy), etc.

PinPoint allows you to search by polygon on a map so you can define a very specific geographical area by a hand-drawn polygon.

PinPoint and the MLS

Although PinPoint is an excellent mapping tool, it is not a replacement for an MLS as it does not allow searching on the full compliment of MLS data fields.

Fines Update

Warnings were up in October (158) versus September (139). There were 24 warnings issued for violation of the 30-day re-entry policy and 43 for unallowable data in remarks. Fines were up in October (36) versus September (24). Ten fines were assessed for inaccurate taxing district and five for inaccurate municipality.

TEMPO Wireless Update