RETS is an acronym which stands for Real Estate Transaction Standard.
RETS was created to overcome the difficulties presented by the existence of a large number of organizations desiring to share and distribute real estate information with others. RETS addressed this need by providing a common standard for the exchange of real estate data. Many MLS data exchange service providers use the RETS protocol.
The Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS) facilitates data transfer between partners in the real estate industry. Creating and improving RETS is a collaborative effort to simplify moving real estate information from system to system and simplify solution development efforts. As RETS usage matures and expands, MLS with geographic overlaps can create data-sharing policies that provide their members a single point of entry to search multiple MLS data sets.