4 ms·

Yes lol. Realtor.com is also scrapable so that’s the immediate backup. Long term I have to speak FTP csv files from a bunch of archaic MLS integrations. If I ne

Yes lol. Realtor.com is also scrapable so that’s the immediate backup. Long term I have to speak FTP csv files from a bunch of archaic MLS integrations. If I need to go that route, I need money.

Rediscover 4y ago
To me, that seems a much simpler route than screen-scraping (yes, despite problems parsing CSV format). I've been involved with screen-scraping of req's for <major airplane company> to produce spreadsheets for others in the same company, and I'll take FTPing the data->CSV almost any day. * Especially when the FAA is the eventual consumer *
- tndibona 4y ago
  The bigger challenge is not the ftp integration per say. The fact that all the housing data is distributed across nearly 500 MLS sites that closely guard their data and make it available only to licensed realtors. I would expect each of these MLS sites to have different formats. So trying to strike up a conversation and allowing them to let me use their FTP site is the biggest hurdle. Zillow and the rest of the big guys already have their claws deep into the MLS sites and they probably want to closely guard their pipelines. Small guys like me don’t know where to start.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
I do integration work for healthcare; you want an interface engine to pull the data from the ftp site, then translate/convert it into your desired format. We do that all the time.
- gooseyman 4y ago
  What’s your favorite tool for this? Just starting to get my feet wet in this world.
smcin 4y ago
But I want to see Realtor.com vs Zillow numbers (vs MLSListings vs Redfin vs the others...). It's not like any of these are ground truth. How much are the discrepancies, where are they and why? Also, is zipcode the lowest level of granularity (presumably not)? Do any of these services have finer granularity?

4 ms·

Yes lol. Realtor.com is also scrapable so that’s the immediate backup. Long term I have to speak FTP csv files from a bunch of archaic MLS integrations. If I ne

by tndibona 4y ago

Yes lol. Realtor.com is also scrapable so that’s the immediate backup. Long term I have to speak FTP csv files from a bunch of archaic MLS integrations. If I need to go that route, I need money.

Rediscover 4y ago
To me, that seems a much simpler route than screen-scraping (yes, despite problems parsing CSV format). I've been involved with screen-scraping of req's for <major airplane company> to produce spreadsheets for others in the same company, and I'll take FTPing the data->CSV almost any day. * Especially when the FAA is the eventual consumer *
- tndibona 4y ago
  The bigger challenge is not the ftp integration per say. The fact that all the housing data is distributed across nearly 500 MLS sites that closely guard their data and make it available only to licensed realtors. I would expect each of these MLS sites to have different formats. So trying to strike up a conversation and allowing them to let me use their FTP site is the biggest hurdle. Zillow and the rest of the big guys already have their claws deep into the MLS sites and they probably want to closely guard their pipelines. Small guys like me don’t know where to start.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
I do integration work for healthcare; you want an interface engine to pull the data from the ftp site, then translate/convert it into your desired format. We do that all the time.
- gooseyman 4y ago
  What’s your favorite tool for this? Just starting to get my feet wet in this world.
smcin 4y ago
But I want to see Realtor.com vs Zillow numbers (vs MLSListings vs Redfin vs the others...). It's not like any of these are ground truth. How much are the discrepancies, where are they and why? Also, is zipcode the lowest level of granularity (presumably not)? Do any of these services have finer granularity?