Abilene Association of REALTORS®: 82,937 Listings From a Legacy RETS Feed

Abilene Association of REALTORS® — full association platform with MLS property search. Live at abileneaor.com.

The situation

Abilene’s previous website was a GrowthZone build. The membership side of their operation wasn’t the problem — the public website was.

What we built

• Property search with live MLS listings and open houses
• Directories for REALTORS®, brokerages and affiliates
• Member resources behind Clareity single sign-on — members use their existing MLS credentials
• Events and classes in one calendar
• Association news, stats and member benefits

The hard part

Abilene’s MLS runs on RETS — a data standard that was formally retired years ago and is still in widespread use.

Working with it meant digest authentication, session-based transport, and a compact record format unlike anything modern. The documented login endpoint no longer resolves, so you have to know the working one. The server reports modification timestamps in US Central with no offset, which will silently break an incremental sync if you assume UTC. Record payloads contain XML entities that need decoding.

None of that appears in a specification. All of it is what "we still use RETS" means in practice.

The first full sync brought across 82,937 listings with zero errors in 64 minutes, along with nearly two million photo references and open house data on 4,943 properties.

Migration

Before cutover we crawled and archived the entire existing site — every page, document and link — and mapped the old addresses to their new homes so bookmarks, newsletter links and search results kept working. After launch we re-crawled and checked every link and asset.