What will MLS data standards do for the consumers?

Hopefully, all of our lives – buyers, sellers, Realtors – will become more efficient.

With the recent talk of how forthcoming data standards are going to make property data sharing more efficient and thus better for consumers and Realtors, here is one of my requests –

I’d love to see a (Google) Mashup (or the MLS would be even better, and I think a no-brainer) providing an overlay of school districts. Albemarle County School Districts are here and the City of Charlottesville’s school districts (archived: 2010) are here. Even better, make it so that registered users could make their own pages with all their important locations to help them organize their thoughts and help their Realtor representatives better understand their thoughts and thought processes.

But here’s a problem – Albemarle’s maps are PDFs and the City’s districts are encased in a Java-heavy page. What’s the solution?

The number I have heard of common fields to be shared is around fourteen – methinks there’s some work to be done with this. I could think of fourteen fields pretty quickly …

Price, address/lat-long/parcel ID, bedrooms, baths, living room, dining room, fireplace, pool, garage, lot size, view, fenced yard?, flooring type?, room locations, laundry?, paved?

Ok, that’s 16 from a stream-of-consciousness, but you get my point.

From a consumer point of view – what are the most important pieces of data that help you get an initial picture of the property?