6 ms·

In real estate, developing with MLS data. - There are over 900 regional MLS providers each with different schemas. - You use RETS, a complicated, non web stan

In real estate, developing with MLS data. - There are over 900 regional MLS providers each with different schemas. - You use RETS, a complicated, non web standards interface for downloading data. - MLS data is plagued with errors and denormalized data making queries difficult.

headcanon 10y ago
A lot of them are so legacy that they "require" IE via a byzantine browser check that prevents modern browsers from using them.
joshuamcginnis 10y ago
Have you seen https://simplyrets.com/ https://simplyrets.com/? I haven't used it but it looks like a great start. This problem is hard to solve at the root because each MLS is independently owned and heavily influenced by the National Association of Realtors and local governments. As an active RE investor myself, I'd love to work on a problem in this space.
- tylercubell 10y ago
  You hit the nail on the head. Having developed with MLS data before, my opinion is there's little incentive for MLSs to make the data easy to work with. As long as each MLS gets their data distributed on the large portals that most consumers use, there's little reward to update (read: spend money on) their systems to implement a modern format to help indie developers and startups. That's the status quo. I don't think anything is going to change unless the large portals band together and spearhead some kind of industry-wide effort to fix this problem. As an aside, I'm working on a RE investment product that solves challenges similar to this one and I'm looking for RE investors to join me. If you're interested, shoot me an email at hello[at]myname.com.
mabbo 10y ago
In Canada, they standardized and built a single website. realtor.ca is, shockingly, a really great user experience when finding a new home.
- ivarv 10y ago
  Ugh. Realtor.ca isn't really due to standardization but monopolization and control. It's a site by CREA (the Canadian Real Estate Assocation) and has exclusive rights to data from all member associations. disclaimer: I am affiliated with rew.ca (a competitor on the west coast)
  - mabbo 10y ago
    Seriously? Damn. Still, great implementation. Hope you can push the bar even higher.
bdangubic 10y ago
The entire Real-Estate industry is ripe for disruption. Exactly why are we paying 6% to "agents"? What are "agents" actually doing? 10+ years ago the need for "Real Estate Agents" was there as information was not readily accessible. Things like "what kind of area is this property in", "what are schools like" "what are prospects for this area 5 years down the road" and so on. All this information (and MUCH more) is currently readily available online. I have purchased and sold 4 homes in the last 6 years and agent I have worked with has made many tens of thousands of dollars and I can tell you with utmost precision that she hasn't spend more than 10 hours total. My wife and I scouted locations, went to open houses, did research online for things that are important to us and finally called the agent and said "we want to make an offer." Other than that the only other time we called is for her to let us into a home if there was no open house soon. 10+ years ago we had other "agents" that made a lot of money, e.g. "Travel Agent" in Travel&Leisure industry. Then internet came along and now we have 1,000's of websites that have replaced what Travel Agents used to do... For Real-Estate I think MLS is just a start a small piece of the puzzle, someone very smart is going to disrupt the whole industry and make many billions of dollars.
- sidlls 10y ago
  The real estate industry is very heavily regulated and, worse, these regulations are extremely fragmented. Any disruption is going to have to deal with that. Also, agents for basic residential purchases where the property is about as mundane as it gets provide very little value. However good agents will do proper diligence by inspecting the public records for the property. That part may be disruptable with software and an ambitious enough records maintenance effort. But good agents who do their jobs properly are well worth 6% (and, by the way, that 6% is frequently split two ways, so each agent gets 3%). Of course my bar for "good agent" is much higher than Joe Coldwell or Jane Keller-Williams. "Good" agents know local and state regulations very well and do diligence to inspect the public record and work closely with well qualified inspectors to get the best (lowest for buyer, highest for seller) price they can. Most agents, especially for "big box" brokers do basic humdrum contract paperwork and have a very basic approach to disclosure and negotiation and don't add much value. They're ripe for disruption.
jungrothmorton 10y ago
For anyone wondering, this is not a technical problem. It is a political/business problem. It's a solved problem to make a system that stores information about home listings and transactions. Other countries have done it. Yeah, houses are annoying because of all the weird combinations. But the thing is just a CRUD app. This system still exists because of organizations that are based on information asymmetry. A small group of experienced people could make a really, really nice platform for sharing real estate data in a month and it would never get anywhere.
- jklein11 10y ago
  Could you give some more detail on what the political/business challenges are?
  - bb611 10y ago
    The biggest one is that realtors exist entirely because of regulation a the state level. After that is the extremely entrenched business interest in the status quo - a lot of people are making money off the current system, and any real disruption is going to cost 95-99% of the real estate industry their jobs. As noted elsewhere, the level of regulation is such that even offering better data to buyers/sellers has a lot of regulatory overhead, including physical offices with real people.
    - rplst8 10y ago
      State? Try county! A lot of the public records for homes are held in county courthouses.
jonstaab 10y ago
Some friends of mine started a wordpress company a few years ago, and after some thrashing trying to find product/market fit, they ended up pursuing real estate SEO, MLS indexing, and easy wordpress + mobile app generation. Check out https://wovax.com/ https://wovax.com/
mosseater 10y ago
Good luck. I used to work at a Startup that tried wrangling MLS data. There is the not-so-trivial problem of gathering all of the data together into one schema. But to offer services on MLS data (like a forward facing website) you need to have a physical office in the MLS region your providing. This problem seems to be more legal than anything.
kingofspain 10y ago
Oh, this a million times. In fact I have a huge pile of cash waiting for someone to fix this. Right now I'm only pulling from a couple of different RETS services but already it's hellish. Regular short term schema changes, terrible lag in pulling data (10+ minutes to pull 30 listings!), low API limits (cut off for pulling image URL's too fast but they won't give a limit - just saying "if we feel it's too much", so pulling images lags for hours as I have to be extra careful. Also no option to pay extra to speed up). That's before you get to matching up fields across multiple MLS's or dealing with weird crossover effects (MLS X cannot be shown in Y from RETS #1 - buts that fine in RETS #2). In fact, I will give you all my money right now anyway, I'm going to go live in the hills far away from it all.

headcanon 10y ago

A lot of them are so legacy that they "require" IE via a byzantine browser check that prevents modern browsers from using them.

joshuamcginnis 10y ago

Have you seen https://simplyrets.com/ https://simplyrets.com/? I haven't used it but it looks like a great start. This problem is hard to solve at the root because each MLS is independently owned and heavily influenced by the National Association of Realtors and local governments. As an active RE investor myself, I'd love to work on a problem in this space.

tylercubell 10y ago
You hit the nail on the head. Having developed with MLS data before, my opinion is there's little incentive for MLSs to make the data easy to work with. As long as each MLS gets their data distributed on the large portals that most consumers use, there's little reward to update (read: spend money on) their systems to implement a modern format to help indie developers and startups. That's the status quo. I don't think anything is going to change unless the large portals band together and spearhead some kind of industry-wide effort to fix this problem. As an aside, I'm working on a RE investment product that solves challenges similar to this one and I'm looking for RE investors to join me. If you're interested, shoot me an email at hello[at]myname.com.

mabbo 10y ago

In Canada, they standardized and built a single website. realtor.ca is, shockingly, a really great user experience when finding a new home.

ivarv 10y ago
Ugh. Realtor.ca isn't really due to standardization but monopolization and control. It's a site by CREA (the Canadian Real Estate Assocation) and has exclusive rights to data from all member associations. disclaimer: I am affiliated with rew.ca (a competitor on the west coast)
- mabbo 10y ago
  Seriously? Damn. Still, great implementation. Hope you can push the bar even higher.

bdangubic 10y ago

The entire Real-Estate industry is ripe for disruption. Exactly why are we paying 6% to "agents"? What are "agents" actually doing? 10+ years ago the need for "Real Estate Agents" was there as information was not readily accessible. Things like "what kind of area is this property in", "what are schools like" "what are prospects for this area 5 years down the road" and so on. All this information (and MUCH more) is currently readily available online. I have purchased and sold 4 homes in the last 6 years and agent I have worked with has made many tens of thousands of dollars and I can tell you with utmost precision that she hasn't spend more than 10 hours total. My wife and I scouted locations, went to open houses, did research online for things that are important to us and finally called the agent and said "we want to make an offer." Other than that the only other time we called is for her to let us into a home if there was no open house soon. 10+ years ago we had other "agents" that made a lot of money, e.g. "Travel Agent" in Travel&Leisure industry. Then internet came along and now we have 1,000's of websites that have replaced what Travel Agents used to do... For Real-Estate I think MLS is just a start a small piece of the puzzle, someone very smart is going to disrupt the whole industry and make many billions of dollars.

sidlls 10y ago
The real estate industry is very heavily regulated and, worse, these regulations are extremely fragmented. Any disruption is going to have to deal with that. Also, agents for basic residential purchases where the property is about as mundane as it gets provide very little value. However good agents will do proper diligence by inspecting the public records for the property. That part may be disruptable with software and an ambitious enough records maintenance effort. But good agents who do their jobs properly are well worth 6% (and, by the way, that 6% is frequently split two ways, so each agent gets 3%). Of course my bar for "good agent" is much higher than Joe Coldwell or Jane Keller-Williams. "Good" agents know local and state regulations very well and do diligence to inspect the public record and work closely with well qualified inspectors to get the best (lowest for buyer, highest for seller) price they can. Most agents, especially for "big box" brokers do basic humdrum contract paperwork and have a very basic approach to disclosure and negotiation and don't add much value. They're ripe for disruption.

jungrothmorton 10y ago

For anyone wondering, this is not a technical problem. It is a political/business problem. It's a solved problem to make a system that stores information about home listings and transactions. Other countries have done it. Yeah, houses are annoying because of all the weird combinations. But the thing is just a CRUD app. This system still exists because of organizations that are based on information asymmetry. A small group of experienced people could make a really, really nice platform for sharing real estate data in a month and it would never get anywhere.

jklein11 10y ago
Could you give some more detail on what the political/business challenges are?
- bb611 10y ago
  The biggest one is that realtors exist entirely because of regulation a the state level. After that is the extremely entrenched business interest in the status quo - a lot of people are making money off the current system, and any real disruption is going to cost 95-99% of the real estate industry their jobs. As noted elsewhere, the level of regulation is such that even offering better data to buyers/sellers has a lot of regulatory overhead, including physical offices with real people.
  - rplst8 10y ago
    State? Try county! A lot of the public records for homes are held in county courthouses.

jonstaab 10y ago

Some friends of mine started a wordpress company a few years ago, and after some thrashing trying to find product/market fit, they ended up pursuing real estate SEO, MLS indexing, and easy wordpress + mobile app generation. Check out https://wovax.com/ https://wovax.com/

mosseater 10y ago

Good luck. I used to work at a Startup that tried wrangling MLS data. There is the not-so-trivial problem of gathering all of the data together into one schema. But to offer services on MLS data (like a forward facing website) you need to have a physical office in the MLS region your providing. This problem seems to be more legal than anything.

kingofspain 10y ago

Oh, this a million times. In fact I have a huge pile of cash waiting for someone to fix this. Right now I'm only pulling from a couple of different RETS services but already it's hellish. Regular short term schema changes, terrible lag in pulling data (10+ minutes to pull 30 listings!), low API limits (cut off for pulling image URL's too fast but they won't give a limit - just saying "if we feel it's too much", so pulling images lags for hours as I have to be extra careful. Also no option to pay extra to speed up). That's before you get to matching up fields across multiple MLS's or dealing with weird crossover effects (MLS X cannot be shown in Y from RETS #1 - buts that fine in RETS #2). In fact, I will give you all my money right now anyway, I'm going to go live in the hills far away from it all.