NAR Policy Statement 7.90

Industry policy — not law United States (trade association)

A binding rule made and enforced by a private trade association through membership and licensing, not by a legislature or regulator.

This is not a law. It is a policy of a trade association, and it is catalogued here because on the evidence it binds more tightly than several statutes that are — and because the distinction is the single most useful thing US real estate teaches about mandates.

Policy Statement 7.90 requires association-owned multiple listing services to certify against the RESO Data Dictionary and RESO Web API within a year of each ratification. Enforcement runs through NAR affiliation rather than through a court or a regulator.

• Self-imposed - Every other mandate in the API Evangelist sector series came from a state: Open Banking in the UK, the Consumer Data Right in Australia, FHIR and the ONC rules in US healthcare. This one an industry wrote for itself.
• Genuinely enforced - Certification is real, conformance testing is real, and the public directory is verifiable without an account. This is not a voluntary code that everyone ignores.
• Schema-only - It compels a contract shape. It says nothing about who may obtain a credential.

What it bought

The State of US Real Estate APIs scored forty-five organizations and measured the return: RESO-certified organizations average 38.0 against 36.0 for everyone else. About two points.

The mechanism of that disappointment is worth stating precisely, because it is not a failure of the policy as written. Certification and reachability are independent variables, and 7.90 mandates only the first. All three certified parties in the study are data resellers rather than portals or MLSs, and every one of their OData $metadata documents returns 401 without an executed MLS licence. Access still runs through IDX and VOW agreements, broker sponsorship, or a reseller contract — none of which 7.90 touches.

The corroborating evidence is blunt: across all forty-five organizations, not one publishes a specification for mls, idx, media, openhouse or member — the mandated Data Dictionary’s own core resources.

Why it is catalogued as policy, not law

Treating a trade-association rule as equivalent to statute would misinform a reader making a compliance or diligence decision. But omitting it would leave this catalog silent on the most-mandated sector in the series. It is recorded here with its kind stated so both facts survive: it is binding, and it is private.

For anyone designing a standards programme, the lesson transfers regardless of instrument. The schema is the easy half. Compel a contract shape without deciding who may call the endpoint, and you will have mandated an excellent description of something nobody can reach.