The standards are designed to significantly reduce the cost,time and errors associated with current methods of exchangingcommercial property listing information between sellers, brokers,listing exchanges and buyers. The standards released today, inturn, are part of a larger effort to create a universally acceptedsystem for the exchange and transfer of information among themyriad types of buyers, sellers, users, service providers,government entities and others who gather and record commercialreal estate information either regularly or from time to tome aspart of their day-to-day businesses.

The standards that were released today are part of an effortthat lasted more than two and a half years, Fuhrman points out. Ashe explains to GlobeSt.com, the reason behind Oscre's formulatingof the standards is that organizations and individuals operating inthe commercial real estate world employ so many differentapproaches to recording the same information. Exchanginginformation can be a daunting task even between two companiesoperating in the same general area of commercial real estate,Fuhrman says.

As a small example of how the use of different data standards bydifferent applications can cause problems, Fuhrman points out thatsome computerized applications call for the names of states to beentered using US Postal Service abbreviations, while others spellout the full name of the state and still others use a different setof abbreviations. Applications employing these different standardstypically cannot be integrated with each other, with the resultthat "Every time that you do an integration between any two ofthese applications, it's a one-off custom integration that getsexpensive and time-consuming."