When the National Association of Realtors announced its Realtors Property Resource (RPR) initiative last fall, it ruffled feathers among industry players who feared the program was nothing more than a backdoor method of launching a national MLS.

Less than a year later, however, those concerns seem to have blown over in the Bay State. The Shrewsbury-based MLS Property Information Network is going live with RPR at the end of the month, and the two other state MLSs are soon to follow.

The Cape and Islands MLS signed with RPR last month and hopes to launch before the end of the year. The Berkshire Board of Realtors MLS is currently in discussions, but said it anticipates going forward with the service “before the end of the year,” CEO Sandra Carroll told Banker & Tradesman.

“We think RPR is a good service to offer to our customers,” said Kathy Condon, president and CEO of MLS PIN, citing a “richer history” of property and community data like school reports and foreclosure information. “There are going to be bumps in the road, but I’m pretty confident that it will work.”

Realtors Get A Leg Up

RPR is a web-based application offered as a member benefit to Realtors. It combines fresh listing data from MLSs with public records and mapping and statistical tools, and includes an automated valuation tool. Agents can use it to search for and compare properties, and produce reports and statistics for listings presentations, broker price opinions and other sales and marketing initiatives.

MLS PIN, by far the largest of the three MLSs in the state, was a beta-testing site for the service, which allowed a small group of MLS PIN members to be part of the final tweaking process before the service was rolled out nationwide. In order to be a beta site, Condon said, MLS PIN had to agree to join RPR for at least one year, after which it will be able to review its agreement with them.

So far, early testers seem to approve.

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Leslie DelMonaco, an agent with Century21 in Leominster, and one of the beta-testers. “It does have some of the information that we already had access to, but now you don’t have to go to different places to get it. And it gives you a whole lot more [than MLS PIN alone].”

Kimberly Allard-Moccia, an agent with Century 21 Professionals in Braintree, said she was pleased with the depth of information available and the way the service allows Realtors to incorporate up-to-date knowledge of local markets when presenting to clients. She cited an ability to update public records information – for example, if a town has a property listed with two bedrooms when it actually has three – as a useful way to incorporate Realtors’ valuable local knowledge.

Realtors hope the new service will give them a leg up over non-Realtor agents and consumer-facing sites by allowing them to provide more focused local data to their clients.

“That is going to be a big benefit to the Realtor community, and hopefully that will be a benefit to the public as well, when we have more information going into a listing than a non-Realtor,” said DelMonaco. “We will look like more of the professional person that can help them, more than someone who does not have it.”

Determining Value

Whether RPR manages to convince other, still-leery MLSs to join up depends on just how valuable those features end up being to agents, says Brian Larson, a Minnesota-based attorney with extensive experience advising MLS clients, including two clients in Massachusetts.

RPR’s competitors, including CoreLogic and Move.com, are also interested in gaining access to MLS listings data. All of the companies in the sector are planning to use the listings to create and sell data analysis products to third parties, such as investment banks and government agencies that study the housing market.

Few MLSs have done an analysis to figure out if creating such data products from their listings is something they could profitably manage themselves, Larson said. And while CoreLogic is offering MLSs direct payment in exchange for their data, RPR is only offering enhanced access to the service itself. If an agent’s MLS doesn’t participate, their NAR membership still grants them access to the site, but only to public records information.

That makes it tough for MLS boards to have a clear yardstick by which to determine the value of allowing access to their listings, Larson said.

As long as MLS PIN members not wishing to share listing data with the service are allowed to opt-out of having it sent to RPR, Condon said she’s not worried RPR will be a substitute for MLS PIN. Since RPR won’t include data from opted out or non-Realtor agents, she said, “It’s not going to be a complete picture of the Boston market, anyway.”

“We’re always skeptical about a new product, but we’ve talked to the RPR people for the last eight or nine months or so, and we think it gives our brokers a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and so we’ve decided to go with it,” said David Callahan, co-owner and broker at Jordan Real Estate in Nantucket, and president of the Cape Cod and Islands Association of Realtors. “Personally I feel it’s a great home evaluation tool, and that will be it’s biggest advantage.”