Metropolitan Regional Information Systems (MRIS), Rockville, MD

Client Profile

Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc. (MRIS) operates the largest online real estate network in the United States, providing services to over 80,000 licensed agents, brokers, and appraisers in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia.

Cornerstone provides 24/7/365 service levels to as many as 40,000 concurrent transactional users, with support for a further 250,000 non-transactional users.

The Challenge

MRIS engaged T4Bi to develop a new integrated database of real estate listings, called Cornerstone. Design goals for this application called for a centralized database with high availability, high performance, localization to subscribing markets, and enormous extensibility and flexibility.

Solution Highlights

The Cornerstone MLS database is the backbone of MRIS’ online operations, implementing core services for real estate professionals within 5 US states (and more anticipated), via a 1TB+ online database and online services. Cornerstone is processing over 2 million requests a day in a true 7/24/365 environment, with load balancing and a failover data-center. There are approximately 40,000 transactional users and 250,000 read-only users. Read-only users include MLS’s subscribing to the CARETS, MIREX, WIREX and TREND consortiums, where Cornerstone is used as a “universal” database integrating data from across all of the subscribing MLS’s.

Cornerstone represents a significant step towards adoption of public standards in the Real Estate industry: T4Bi ensured that the services and data formats of the Cornerstone platform are compliant with the protocols developed as a part of the RETS specification (Real Estate Transaction Standard, see http://www.rets.org .

Highlights of the solution are:

High-performance / high-availability service-oriented (SOA)
Java 7
Oracle
Real Estate Transaction Standard (www.reso.org)

Technologies Used

Oracle 11g
Linux
Oracle WebLogic (with load balancing)
Clustered Servers
2^nd data center for real-time no-loss failover

Ready to Modernize?

Modern IT systems aren’t just about compliance — they’re about enabling agility, scalability, and cost efficiency. They’re also about making the right judgment calls: preserving and evolving what makes your business unique, while integrating or
standardizing what is simply a table-stake capability.

Every year, code maintenance costs average 25% of the original build. The opportunity cost of not modernizing is even higher. The real challenge is making architectural decisions that avoid over-engineering or platform lock-in — and ensure systems remain sustainable.