Charlotte Zawada is a lifelong resident of the Waterloo Region. She is active in her community and over the years has volunteered with a number of local charities and not-for-profits. Charlotte is a real estate sales representative withRe/Max Twin City Realty, and is an active member of the Kitchener Waterloo Association of REALTORS® where she has served on the Board of Directors since 2013 and is currently the president.
First I would like to thank Social Development Centre Waterloo Region and the Kitchener-Waterloo VisitAble Housing Task Force for inviting the Kitchener-Waterloo Association of REALTORS® to participate in today’s panel.
Before I talk about how the KW Association of REALTORS has integrated Visitable Housing into our MLS® System, I’d like to provide a little bit of background.
The KWAR is a not-for-profit association, founded over 75 years ago and we represent just over 1300 local REALTOR members. In addition to providing professional development seminars and advocacy…we also operate the local MLS® System.
I would like to take a brief moment to explain what the MLS® System is, since I suspect many might have the incorrect impression. When many people hear MLS….they think about the public facing advertising website, REALTOR.ca – or what many still commonly refer to as mls.ca – However, this public website is simply the advertising vehicle for the property listings of member brokers.
It’s also important to understand that that the MLS® System itself, is not simply a database.
Rather, an MLS® System is a co-operative selling system operated and promoted by a local real estate Board such as KWAR, and includes
-an inventory of listings of participating REALTOR® members
-ensures a high level of accuracy for this information
-Requires our realtors to maintain a higher standard of professionalism and a code of ethics
-and ensures standards of co-operation between REALTOR® .
This is unique concept in the world of commerce in the sense that competitors are sharing both their inventory and historical sales data with each other, all for the purpose of better serving the consumer.
Up until very recently the KWAR’s MLS® System, like most board’s in Ontario was a stand-alone system which covered, for the most part its own local geographical jurisdiction.
That landscape is changing however, today the KW Association of REALTORS now operates on a shared regionalized MLS® System with three other real estate boards: Cambridge, Guelph and the Oakville-Milton Real Estate Associations. And that will grow…other boards in Ontario are looking at the opportunity to join our regional system.
Today we now have over 3500 REALTORS using one common system across these 4 trading areas. As you can appreciate, regionalizing our MLS® System provides our members with greater information while ensuring standards of professionalism and cooperation between all users.
You can also appreciate that getting to this point, of regionalizing 4 real estate boards onto one common shared system, with one set of rules, common fields, shared common forms, and converting and mapping the historical data of all 4 boards into one system was a massive undertaking. And In fact it took more than a few years to complete.
This is what made Trudy’s timing, so perfect. It was the summer of 2014 when the VisitAble Housing Taskforce first approached the KWAR about putting on a Visitable Housing Workshop for REALTORS.
We held our first Workshop in February 2015 and another followed in the Spring.
One of the outcomes from that first workshop was the realization that we as a real estate industry were not doing a very good job of identifying homes with accessibility features. In these workshops, REALTORS spoke up and shared their own experiences and frustration of trying to find suitable properties for clients who needed homes that were accessible or even adaptable.
This is when the question was asked if this was something the real estate board could integrate into the MLS® System.
Traditionally making changes…adding fields…to the MLS® System is a complicated, difficult and expensive proposition. But fortunately in this instance timing was ideal as we had this unique window of opportunity to actually build and include the “Visitability” as a field in our new regionalized MLS® System.
So now as a realtor, if I want to search for a home that is “Visitable” I can do that. Or if I have a listing that meets the Visitablity criteria I can identify my listing as being Visitable.
And while this is all really wonderful, and we were very happy to be able to integrate this feature into system….the challenge now is getting people to use it. And use it correctly.
If I login to our System today, and search for Visitable Homes…of the over 1300 active residential listings within Waterloo Region, 39 will come up as being Visitable. However, upon closer inspection of these listings, I discover that some of these homes probably aren’t technically Vistable. Likewise, I know there are also examples of properties that should fit this criteria that are not coming up…and that’s because the person listing that property dosen’t know what Visitable Housing is, or why this is important information.
Having the technology do what you want to do is only part of the equation. The bigger challenge now is raising awareness among the membership and greater REALTOR community so they understand what Visitable Housing is. We also have to educate them on how they can use these features, to not only better market their listings, but also collectively we can better serve our clients.
Working with Trudy and her team, we’ve introduced the concept of accessible and adaptable housing into our MLS® System. For any room that is identified in a listing, the seller and listing agent are able to flag it for having certain features and attributes. That might be a skylight, or a fireplace, or more to the point, as being Accessible or Adaptable.
Now that the system supports this, our focus as KWAR is supporting these changes through continued education.
And that’s why today’s forum is great and I’m glad to see many of my REATLOR colleagues here.
I want to thank the K-W Vistiable Housing Initiative for what they are doing and the support they have provided to KWAR.
They have put together some great tools for both Real Estate Professional & Home Seekers.
There is The Understanding Accessibility Features to Meeting Housing Needs publication, and I believe there are copies in your packages.
As president of the KWAR I’m very proud that we were able to integrate Vistability into our regional MLS® System. I do believe this is just the beginning. As we expand our MLS® System to cover additional jurisdictions across Ontario, and as the awareness of Visitable Housing increases – we should see more Real Estate Associations adopting this as a standard field.
And we really need to acknowledge the work that Trudy and her team have done from the Social Development Centre Waterloo Region and the VisitAble Housing Task Force. This happened because of their initiative. And a little bit of good timing, with the regionalizing of our MLS® System, we were able to get this integrated much faster than it would have otherwise. And certainly reach a much larger group of realtors.
Now the real work of education and awareness building needs to begin.
But it’s a great first step.
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