Syndicate
) October 31, 2008 -- Blevins Wist Real Estate, the Maryland-based real estate sales and consulting company of Keller Williams Realty agents Michael Wist and Matthew Blevins, has recently launched the upgraded version of their company's website (blevinswistrealestate.com), which now features real-time updates to listings of Maryland homes for sale and full user search capabilities.
The site, developed according to specifications put forth by Metropolitan Regional Information Systems (MRIS) under RETS (Real Estate Transaction Specification) is a full-featured online resource for home buyers and home sellers and represents a "pipeline" of information from the backend MLS system to potential buyers and sellers of Maryland real estate.
According to Matthew Blevins, a Maryland Realtor and Director of Marketing for the Company, "Michael and I have a background in website design, online marketing and application development architecture. We started out with our Maryland real estate blog to get the site up and running, but we've also been studying the websites of real estate agents for quite some time, even before we were agents ourselves. What we found, for the most part, were a series of websites that were bland, of limited usefulness to potential clients and that lacked any real imagination. With the advent of RETS and participating IDX brokers, any agent can now provide MLS listings to users of their websites, but we've been surprised to find that even when they do, they're still not doing a very good job of it."
Because the public had been complaining about the lack of publicly-available information about the real estate market, and real estate agents in Maryland and throughout the country have been clamoring for a solution, RETS and the practice of allowing agents to display real estate listings that come directly from MLS systems was implemented several years ago. MRIS, the largest MLS system in the world, serves states in the mid-Atlantic region, but consists primarily of Maryland properties. The move itself was one that opened up the "black box" of the real estate industry, where closely-guarded information, i.e. - readily updated "official" listings of homes for sale - was granted only to licensed agents, who used that information advantage to maintain the industry veil that has existed since the advent of the multiple list service itself.
Perhaps realizing that the age of closed information systems was over and the age of standards-based "open source" had arrived, the National Association of Realtors®, as well as state and local boards, have been instrumental in the development of RETS.
The result has been a boon for both consumers and real estate agents savvy enough to understand the public's use of the Internet to research and locate homes for sale or to conduct market research in assessing the value of their own homes. The Blevins Wist site, for example, allows users to search for residential properties, commercial properties (including multi-family) and land. Users also have the option of being as broad or as specific with their search as they like by using such search fields as County, City, Zip Code, MLS Number, Street Name, Street Number, List Price, Number of Bedrooms, Number of Bathrooms, Lot Size, and a variety of others. The result is a direct window to the information that Realtors® use to perform competitive market analyses (CMAs) and to locate listings to show potential buyers.
Adds Michael Wist, also a Maryland Realtor® and the President of Blevins Wist Real Estate, "It may seem that we've chosen an odd time to ramp up our real estate operations and enhance our website. But Matt and I have always been contrarians, so we feel that there is no better time than the present, even with a so-called financial crisis slamming down upon us, to enhance our Company and to provide another level of service to the well-educated consumer who understands that, in the larger view, the current situation is merely an opportunity."
About Blevins Wist Real Estate:
Blevins Wist Real Estate, Inc. is a Maryland corporation founded in 2007 and is associated with Keller Williams Baltimore. The company is the real estate sales and consulting company of Maryland real estate agents Michael Wist and Matthew Blevins, who began their foray into Baltimore real estate in 2003 and have expanded their business to include all of central Maryland.
Both Michael and Matthew are Maryland-licensed Realtors® as well as members of the Maryland Association of Realtors®, the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors® and the National Association of Realtors®. They have served their clients in their capacity as knowledgeable residential and commercial real estate agents since 2003.
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