Thursday, December 22, 2005

NMHC Wants to Set the Standard

For the benefit of all, check out the NMHC's MITS website.

NMHC and NAA are supporting an industry-wide initiative to establish a standard data architecture that should enhance and support the development of systems solutions for the apartment industry. This initiative is called the "Multifamily Information and Transactions Standard" (MITS) project. To date, the standards initiative has established seven separate transactions-based standards, including marketing/ILS, leasing, property maintenance, property physical asset, resident screening and several others.

As the MITS website states, "A single data standard will enable apartment firms to improve their operations and reduce their costs by making systems integration and data exchange technologies more effective and efficient. The final product envisioned from this effort is a data dictionary and extensible mark-up language (XML) schema that will collectively facilitate data exchange and transmission." (Find more information on XML here.)

MITS has the potential to become an extremely important standard if and when it is embraced by the key players in the industry. The data standard will allow property owners to streamline their operations, integrate more building systems and offer more services to their residents than ever before. Stay tuned to NMHC for more details...