The ezRETS ODBC Driver, from the Center for REALTOR® Technology (CRT) at the National Assocation of REALTORS®, was designed to allow ODBC-aware applications to easily query data from any Mulitple Listing Service that supports the RETS standard. Many of the programs in Microsfot Office can utilize ezRETS to integrate real estate listing data directly into your own custom documents.

This short document shows an example of a simple CMA excel template that was created. You might find this instructive for your own work with ezRETS.

The first thing needed is to have ezRETS installed and configured for your MLS. That is explained in a document at http://www.crt.realtors.org/projects/rets/ezrets/documentation/

This shows two datasources configured to use the ezRETS driver. For our CMA we will be using RetsDemo.

First, we launch Excel and load our template.

This is the CMA before we've retrieved that data from the RETS server. All the elements that says #NAME? will be either pulled from the RETS server or calculated based on a value from the RETS server.

Next, we click over to the setup tab.

This is the setup tab where we've entered our information as an agent, and the information about the property we're going to compare to. It is assumed that this property doesn't yet exist in the MLS database.

Next, we need to select the datasource we want to pull the information from.

This is the setup tab where we're selecting the datasource. We will be selecting RetsDemo.

We already know the MLS IDs of the properties we want to compare to, so we fill those in.

This is the setup tab with all the data entered we need to do the CMA.

Now we click on Run Analysis and generate the CMA.

This is the completed CMA. All values that were listed as #NAME? before are filled in either via the RETS server, or are calulated off a value from the RETS server.

We can go to middle tab of Comp Properties to see the raw data from the RETS server imported into Excel.

Here is the raw data from the query against the RETS server.

Using ezRETS and taking some time to setup an Excel template, you can easily make CMAs such as the one above. However, you don't need to limit yourself to CMAs, whatever you can think of can be done with an ODBC aware app and some time to build what you need.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions on this document, please email info@crt.realtors.org