LISTINGS@FLEXMAIL SOFTWARE
RETS stands for Real Estate Transaction Standard which is a set of documents describing how software developers can program their software according to standards agreed upon by the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO). You can also contact FBS's RETS support team. We have tutorials, troubleshooting tips and links to programs and tools to help you. Once you have credentials, this RETS support site can be used to help you use the flexmls™ RETS server for which you have permission. So, if you do not already have permission, you must first contact the MLS, which, in turn, will provide you credentials. Instead, permission can only be granted by the MLS. This site and FBS's RETS support is NOT how you get permission to access the RETS server. This site offers support for developers using the RETS servers FBS provides to customers of its flexmls™ system. To learn more about FBS's API offerings contact us at visit our Spark® API documentation or RESO Web API documentation pages, or register for a demo account at. Additionally, if desired a developer can forego replicating data locally and instead make "live" calls to an API on the fly - resulting in savings on both hosting and infrastructure costs.
The primary driving force behind an API is the ability to not only retrieve many different kinds of data (listings, roster, contacts, saved searches, etc), but easily write that data back into the MLS system, thus creating deeper integrations with third party products. Due to a number of technological limitations the industry is shifting away from RETS to a more modern solution APIs. RETS is a legacy real estate data standard based on XML that allows a developer to retrieve listing and roster data from an MLS system and replicate it to their own local database.