The standards are designed to significantly reduce the cost, time and errors associated with current methods of exchanging commercial property listing information between sellers, brokers, listing exchanges and buyers. The standards released today, in turn, are part of a larger effort to create a universally accepted system for the exchange and transfer of information among the myriad types of buyers, sellers, users, service providers, government entities and others who gather and record commercial real estate information either regularly or from time to tome as part of their day-to-day businesses.

The standards that were released today are part of an effort that lasted more than two and a half years, Fuhrman points out. As he explains to GlobeSt.com, the reason behind Oscre's formulating of the standards is that organizations and individuals operating in the commercial real estate world employ so many different approaches to recording the same information. Exchanging information can be a daunting task even between two companies operating in the same general area of commercial real estate, Fuhrman says.

As a small example of how the use of different data standards by different applications can cause problems, Fuhrman points out that some computerized applications call for the names of states to be entered using US Postal Service abbreviations, while others spell out the full name of the state and still others use a different set of abbreviations. Applications employing these different standards typically cannot be integrated with each other, with the result that "Every time that you do an integration between any two of these applications, it's a one-off custom integration that gets expensive and time-consuming."