>BUT, only brokerages have access to MLS feeds. A long time ago, I worked for a small real-estate ASP. Now, their target was websites for realtors. They did

>BUT, only brokerages have access to MLS feeds. A long time ago, I worked for a small real-estate ASP. Now, their target was websites for realtors. They didn't have any direct-to-consumer stuff. Real-estate agent and you want a webpage? give these folks $20-$100 a month, depending on features. My understanding of our model was that we got access to the MLS data in the customer's name, then wrote scripts to go from the format that one MLS used to our format and let agents from that area list stuff on their website. Now, while I was there, we didn't have any kind of cross-region search setup, and maybe there would be a legal barrier to doing so... but they sure did have a whole lot of MLS data. That's the thing. Yeah, every MLS uses a different format, but from experience? once you get in the swing of it, you should be able to write import scripts for several different MLS formats in a single day. It's not actually difficult work. Most of them were some variant on CSV or XML, and the customers are super tolerant of errors, because the MLS data itself was full of errors. I guess what I'm saying is that at least getting all the MLS data isn't as hard as it looks. I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's the sort of thing, I mean, legal barriers aside, that I could do in a few years with me, a PFY and a salesperson who has real-estate contacts. I'm sure that if you had competence and money, you could do it in a reasonable amount of time.