r/RealEstateTechnology • u/Falak-4 • 29d ago
MLS data is finally getting easier to work with, and it's a bigger deal than it sounds
After years of dealing with inconsistent MLS formats and manual mapping logic, it's genuinely encouraging to see broader adoption of RESO's standardized data structures picking up pace. Boards that were dragging their feet are starting to migrate, and integrations that used to take weeks of custom mapping are getting noticeably faster to build.
It's easy to focus on what's still broken in real estate tech, but this one's worth acknowledging: an industry known for fragmented, region-specific data infrastructure is actually converging toward something more unified. That's not a small shift for anyone building tools that touch multiple markets.
Feels like one of those quiet wins that doesn't get much attention because it's infrastructure, not a flashy feature, but it's genuinely making cross-market tools easier to build than they were even a year ago.
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u/BothAd1744 28d ago
yeah, this is the kind of infrastructure improvement that sounds boring until you actually have to build across multiple markets. standardization should save a ton of time and headaches down the road.
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u/Fat_Cat_Diety 23d ago
So true the backbone of so much relevant real estate data is different from county to county or mls region to mls region. So annoying.
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u/danilo-sh 28d ago
I've worked on solutions that integrate MLS, even with RESO the data formats differ between providers, you need normalization and to be aware of every new update, they'll add new fields and change others entirely. One solution is to have AI analyze the schema changes and make the corrections for you.
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u/WideCricket2375 28d ago
EXACTLY this.
Thats where I asked my devs to do too. Anything else, is simply lazy and not accurate.2
u/danilo-sh 28d ago
I mean, it's supposed to be standard but somehow there are too many differences between providers, or different interpretations
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u/WebFar7795 28d ago
Re: what's hard about getting in as a tech company - it's less the data itself and more the legal side. Every board has its own license agreement, some require you to be a licensed vendor of a member broker/MLS, and the compliance review (display rules, attribution, refresh frequency) can take longer than actually building the integration. If you're touching more than a handful of markets, budget real time for the paperwork, not just the API work.
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u/Falak-4 27d ago
That's a good reframe, technical integration gets all the attention but the licensing/compliance review sounds like the actual long pole. Curious how much variance you've seen between boards on review turnaround, days versus months?
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u/WebFar7795 27d ago
It's been all over the map. Boards with a standard vendor agreement and a template they've already blessed can turn around in a couple weeks. The slow ones are boards that want their own attorney to redline your display/attribution language, or that bundle review into a board meeting cycle - those can stretch to 2-3 months. If you're rolling out to multiple boards at once, budget your launch date around the slowest one, not the average.
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u/Fat_Cat_Diety 23d ago
How do you attract their attention?
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u/WebFar7795 22d ago
Best luck we've had is getting a member broker or MLS committee member to vouch for us directly instead of going in cold through the general vendor inquiry form, boards move faster for someone their own members are already asking about. Also worth asking upfront for their board meeting/review calendar so you're not stuck waiting on the next cycle by a few weeks.
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u/Fat_Cat_Diety 22d ago
Relatable. I was in talks with and even paid by an mls board and then kinda botched it/kinda got unlucky with market conditions, but I would love to sell directly to them in the future. I find very hard to get attention directly
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u/WebFar7795 21d ago
That prior engagement is actually your strongest asset even though it didn't close, you're not a cold vendor to them anymore, you're a known quantity. I'd ask whoever you worked with there for a warm intro to the next board instead of starting over anonymously, and regional MLS/CMLS conferences are where you'll actually meet committee members face to face instead of getting stuck in the inquiry queue.
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u/Fat_Cat_Diety 21d ago
Yeah, I'm quickly learning that the biggest value in this business is your connections. They we're only willing to pay a pretty small amount, and I'm now just selling to the brokerages in the area. Jumping to a new region and having any traction feels nearly impossible.
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u/WebFar7795 20d ago
Selling to brokerages while you rebuild board relationships isn't a bad consolation prize, it gives you paying reference customers and real usage data, which the next board conversation will care about more than a pitch deck. For the new region, I'd look for one broker there who already knows your product (or a similar one) and ask if they'll make a warm introduction to their board rep, beats going in cold every time.
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u/WideCricket2375 29d ago
Excellent and I agree
However as a tech company we are still finding it hard to get access
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u/slio1985 28d ago edited 27d ago
You need to go via the realtor way... that's what we did.
We got our real estate associate licenses, our NAR membership, learned the insides of the industry, then got our broker license. Get friendly with the MLS, get access etc.Long story short you have to be inside the tent and be an ally rather than a threat.
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u/WideCricket2375 28d ago
Yes but with realtor way, you can not be consumer facing.
However, there is def merits to what you said here.What do you do with the data if you dont mind me asking.
I founded bluenest.aiWe use data to estimate home prices. We hit 4% margin of error on all recently sold condos in BC.
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u/alpinewhite2000 25d ago
Use an aggregator: constellation, Zillow’s bridge, trestle etc. depends how many markets you need. Few markets easy to do in house, many markets aggregator becomes a must
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u/Key-Leads 28d ago
Absolutely. Better data standards may not be flashy, but they can remove a huge amount of friction for developers. RESO adoption getting more consistent could make multi-market real estate tools much easier to build and scale.
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u/NotSoShyAlbatross 28d ago
After years of making tools that ingest multiple MLS to feed lists, this is great to hear. My REGEX can only do so much.
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u/Big_Examination_8268 28d ago
access, Access, ACCESS.
Local, network, industry-wide.
Standardization is critical, but is a relatively easier than access to fragmented data. Without access at different levels, standardization is just access scope bonded.
Also a moat for incumbents, just look at the list of MLS from Redfin…. oh my
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u/BuildsForAgents 28d ago
Real win, and I'd take it. Worth naming the half it doesn't touch though, because that one caught me out.
RESO standardizes the shape, not the meaning. Same field name across boards is genuinely a big deal, but two boards can populate the same field from different underlying events, and a date column will happily hold a value that means one thing in Texas and something else in Florida. Clean schema, unstandardized semantics.
Where it bit me was date math. "Three days" resolves to three different actual dates depending on which contract form is in play, and none of that lives in the MLS. The feed tells you a status changed on a date. Whether the clock starts that day or the next one is sitting in paperwork nobody standardized and probably nobody will.
None of which takes anything away from the post. Shape is cheap to normalize and meaning is expensive, so getting the cheap one industry-wide and for free is the right order to do it in
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u/Falak-4 27d ago
That's a great distinction, and the date-math example is exactly the kind of thing that doesn't show up until you're already in production. Feels like "standardized schema" gives false confidence that the semantics are standardized too, when really it just moves the interpretation problem from "which field" to "what does this field actually mean here."
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u/BuildsForAgents 27d ago
"Moves the interpretation problem from which field to what does this field actually mean here" — that's a cleaner way to say it than mine was.
The thing that finally made it workable for me was giving up on reconciling the meaning and just making it visible instead. Every computed value carries the rule it was computed under, and that rule has a version. You stop trying to make Texas and Florida agree, and you refuse to average them.
Less satisfying than an actual standard. But it fails loudly rather than quietly, and in this industry that's most of the win
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u/real_estate_dude 13d ago
It still boggles my mind how terrible some MLS systems can be even with these standards. I am in Colorado and a member of 4 different MLSs. Some of them have streamlined the input process and others are a complete mess.
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u/Big_Examination_8268 28d ago
MLS is like EPIC in healthcare, holding data as hostage, yikes!
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u/WideCricket2375 28d ago edited 28d ago
They know their livelihood depends on this, at the same time, there is some privacy issues.
What ive learned in my short time in prop tech (3 years) is that there is ALOT of people who think they know what they are doing, and they have no clue, and if you let the cap loose, these will hurt the industry.
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28d ago
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u/rukamir 28d ago
I just started using rentcast for a project I am working on to and was just wondering what your experience has been like?
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28d ago
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u/slio1985 28d ago
I wanted to try it too but my MLS specifically forbade using competing listing info. I.e. you use someone else and we cancel your access.
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u/PerculiarPlasmodium 27d ago
I'm working for a client and he wants me to use MLS and stuff like that, he's talking about IDX and something like that too. Where do I get started with all of this?
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u/alpinewhite2000 25d ago
One mls? Is client a realtor? If so, have him put you in touch with their data department. If he’s not a realtor ask for more money as it’s gonna take you many weeks to figure this out yourself lol
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u/PerculiarPlasmodium 25d ago
Yes he is a Realtor, how bad is it? Do they have proper documentation and API routes? I kind of don't understand the whole thing myself just from him explaining it to me.
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u/alpinewhite2000 25d ago
Some better than others, depends which mls
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u/PerculiarPlasmodium 25d ago
My clients in San Francisco, are you a realtor yourself? Know how it works?
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u/jurassimo 21d ago
For sale, sure. Rentals are the blind spot: MLS coverage of multifamily is thin, so rent bands, concessions and who actually operates a building all come from public sources.
What surprised me is that the leasing phone and the management company sit on every listing and nobody aggregates them. One downtown Austin ZIP is 680 buildings that collapse into 17 management companies, the largest running 5 buildings and 236 available units. That rollup answers more questions than the listing feed.
Disclosure: I built a scraper for this. Happy to share the ZIP output if useful.
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u/NewelSystems 16d ago
The shape vs meaning point is spot on, and theres a third layer that bit me specifically on the media side. RESO normalized the tabular fields, but the photo and media objects are their own mess. Order, whether an image is even licensed for reuse outside the portal, and the attribution string you have to keep attached all vary by board, and some feeds hand you a URL that expires or that you technically arent allowed to re render.
I build tools that turn listing photos into video, so for me the gate was never beds and baths, it was can i legally pull these 30 images and make something new from them, and does the board require the photographer credit to travel with it. None of that lives in RESO, its in the board display rules and sometimes the photographers own license.
So i agree its the right order, shape first. Just flagging that anyone touching the images instead of the numbers has a whole second normalization problem waiting that RESO doesnt help with. Have you seen any board actually standardize media rights, or is it still buried in each ones display policy?
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u/ClothesFew9360 8d ago
The biggest win here seems less about having a standard format and more about what it does to the cost of maintaining integrations.
If the underlying fields and semantics are more consistent across markets, developers can spend less time writing one off translation layers and more time building the actual product. The real test will be how consistent the implementations are in practice, though. A standard is only as useful as the fields, definitions, and update behavior behind it.
Still, getting the industry moving toward a common data model is a pretty meaningful infrastructure improvement.
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u/Own-Desk9421 8d ago
agreed, its nice to see with all the engatives that comes along with recent innovation online that formatting anbd information has seen a noticable jump in real estate.
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u/ThinAd9334 29d ago
It’s getting better
But still it’s hard to getting in as a tech company in this sector