RESO wants to standardize listing data

The Real Estate Standards Organization wants to standardize some of the more confusing parts of a listing by creating an industry-wide “data dictionary” of definitions.

Two of the notable definitions the group would like to set are number of bathrooms and days on market.

“Number of bathrooms,” you might think, is pretty straightforward. You’ve got full baths and half baths, so a home might have 2 baths, 3 baths, or 2 1/2 baths, and so on. But that raises the question of what constitutes a fractional bath.

If it has a sink and toilet, is that half? What if it’s just a toilet? (My wife’s family’s 19th-century farmhouse has such a room.) What if it has a shower stall but not a bathtub — is that 3/4? Is a two-seater outhouse “1″ or “1/2 + 1/2″?

And how do you do the math? If you read that a house has “2.5 baths” does that mean…

• Bath A: Toilet, sink, shower
• Bath B: Toilet, sink, shower
• Bath C: Toilet, sink

or

• Bath A: Toilet, two sinks, shower, Jacuzzi
• Bath B: Toilet, sink, shower

or

• Bath A: Toilet, bidet, two sinks, two-person shower, Jacuzzi
• Bath B: Toilet

or

• A four-seater outhouse with a sink nearby and an outdoor shower stall?

You see the issue.

So RESO wants to not only standardize definitions, but break them down, so a listing would include not only total baths, but “baths full,” “baths half,” “baths three-quarter,” and “baths one-quarter.”

Read all about it — click here for the Inman News article.