The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board has announced plans to launch a new “multi-list” technology platform for more than 60,000 TRREB and partner-board members.
“TRREB will be the first board in the country to offer this ground-breaking platform that will offer a more intelligent way for real estate professionals to help and support their clients, manage their business and elevate their integral role in the home ownership journey,” says TRREB CEO John DiMichele.
“This backend has a few different features that are pretty much leading edge,” DiMichele told REM. “It’s feature rich in allowing more than just one group to use it. The backend is the engine that runs this and it’s got so much more flexibility and opportunity for people to be innovative.
“Because of that flexibility you can make changes quicker, you can customize things better and ultimately it leads into the concept of the blockchain environment where the concept of taking a transaction from contract to conveyance digitally will happen in a very secure, faster, lower-risk environment.”
TRREB has partnered with Teranet, which operates the Electronic Registration System for property in Ontario, and technology specialists AMP Systems (a sister company of Stratus Data Systems) of Scottsdale, Ariz. to launch what it describes as the next-generation multi-list platform and blockchain solution. TRREB worked with T3 Sixty, a real estate industry management consultancy based in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., to help undertake the research.
“We want to be a purveyor of choice – something that will create that opportunity for innovation and for people to choose how they want to use the system and customize it for a brokerage or a member or an association. It’s not necessarily one size fits all,” says DiMichele.
He says with blockchain, “The user experience in today’s world probably won’t change for some time,” but what will change is “what happens after the fact once the contract or transaction is in play. You’re going to see through the system a seamless approach. It’s secure. It’s fast. It will be efficient and transparent with a lot of communication associated with it that will happen digitally. And you’ll be able to see the lending process, the appraisal process. All these things will now become part of this blockchain block.
Another advantage of the new system is that it will be able to bring together data from several different sources. “Right now you’ve got to go to so many places to get the data you need. This will provide the flexibility to create that one dashboard for the member to use rather than having to go to various places,” he says. “As new products come on and people have the opportunity to provide different services, this system will be more of a facilitation environment rather than just an MLS.
“Right now MLS is efficient. It’s effective. It’s worldwide and we do a good job, but the technology that we use today and the concepts that we use today are probably 20-years-old,” says DiMichele. “What we want to do is add things like artificial intelligence. We want to have a much better voice experience for our members and ultimately they can position it and provide consumers with better information.”
The new system will be compliant with Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO) standards, so “basically anybody who wanted to, could effectively map their system to ours,” says DiMichele.
TRREB hopes to be testing the platform at the end of the summer or early fall.
DiMichele said all three partners in the new platform bring specific expertise to the table. AMP Systems is focused on designing more efficient, powerful workflow tools to optimize real estate professionals’ day-to-day business processes. Teranet brings a history and strength in modernizing registry and data intelligence platforms.
“This is about efficiencies too. We want to make this a really efficient experience. A lot of the things we see today – unfortunately, it takes time to do things and it’s not as efficient as it could be,” says DiMichele. “We want to make sure that our members are always on the leading edge and that they have the flexibility and choice while we’re protecting the consumers’ personal confidential information.
“We want to make it a simple experience and solve the complex problems. We want this concept of more choice and transparency. We want to be able to personalize what members want to experience…. We want to be able to have less bureaucracy, better economies of scale…. We also need to be more nimble as the needs and wants of consumers change. We need to be able to adapt and adopt our systems to those particular choices.”
Mario Toneguzzi is a contributing writer for REM. He has more than 40 years of experience as a daily newspaper writer, columnist, and editor. He worked for 35 years at the Calgary Herald, covering sports, crime, politics, health, faith, city and breaking news, and business. He now works on his own as a freelance writer for several national publications and consultant in communications and media relations/training. Mario was named in 2021 as one of the Top 10 Business Journalists in the World by PR News – the only Canadian to make the list.
