Real estate markets scramble following cyberattack on listings provider

61 points by ricberw 1 year ago | 46 comments
  • macNchz 1 year ago
    Given that MLS services’ current existence is less about the technical innovation of disseminating market information with a shared database of listings, and more about aggressively protecting the status quo of the real estate industry by maintaining information asymmetry between brokers and market participants…I am inclined to react in the style of Jeremy Clarkson: “Oh no! Anyway…”
    • echelon 1 year ago
      It's awful that the industry is glued to this dated, monopolistic system.

      Why hasn't an alternative emerged?

      It would be amazing for buyers to have access to this system. You could query for homes matching all kinds of wild parameters. Instead, it's all under lock and key.

      Zillow and the other public systems sit downstream of MLS with a paltry amount of (typically outdated) information. And these are barely searchable.

      • macNchz 1 year ago
        > Why hasn't an alternative emerged?

        To my understanding, mostly because the MLS services are owned by realtor associations, and the current model of how they work is highly lucrative to the industry, so they're incentivized to push back on any sort of competition.

        This is partly through regulatory capture: real estate organizations lobbied state governments to set licensing requirements for who can actually be involved in the real estate market, and only licensed realtors are allowed to access the MLS.

        There are two major class-action lawsuits currently underway that challenge this: https://www.businessinsider.com/real-estate-agents-lawsuits-...

        • housemusicfan 1 year ago
          I posed a similar question in another thread. Why hasn't an alternative emerged for SAP? For Concur? All these tools reputedly universally hated, all have near-monopolies. Why?

          Because few are motivated enough to tackle 'boring' problems. Who wants to design a real estate database when you could be working on self driving-crypto-cloud-next level bullshit?

          • echelon 1 year ago
            > Because few are motivated enough to tackle 'boring' problems.

            Lots of people take on "boring" markets. I don't think that's the problem.

            Zillow and Redfin are a few steps removed from being MLS themselves. But for some reason they cannot morph into it.

          • linsomniac 1 year ago
            >Zillow and the other public systems sit downstream of MLS with a paltry amount of (typically outdated) information.

            That is largely dependent on the MLS. A lot of Realtors don't really like Zillow, for various reasons that largely boil down to selling marketing on the listings. Our MLS allows individual Realtors to opt-out of sending to Zillow, but otherwise listing data flows over to Zillow within a few minutes usually.

            Now, if you have one of those opt-out listings, it doesn't mean that Zillow doesn't have the listing, it just means that they get it through other means, and that usually is what leads to outdated information. As far as the amount of information, they have access to, AFAIK, all the listing information, when pulled directly from the MLS. Going via other sources will make that vary.

            • matthewfcarlson 1 year ago
              I’ve dabbled on and off with a much more searchable Zillow with all sorts of crazy filters. I’ve wanted to look across the whole country that less than an hour from an airport, within 10 minutes from a grocery store, and with fiber internet. I’d like to see Zillow or Redfin filter on that
              • dylan604 1 year ago
                >and with fiber internet

                hell, i'd like to filter on that on the websites of fiber providers. they say, "we can't see what areas are covered. we can only see if a specific address is available." i've seen in the days of ADSL that one side of the street was able to get service, but directly across the street was not. Something about how the lines across the street are clustered in older equipment blah blah blah. So they telco doesn't know what equipment where without that specific address lookup.

          • linsomniac 1 year ago
            Just to clarify a few things, probably not entirely accurate as I'm not a Realtor, but I'm closer to the industry than most:

            An MLS is really just a database and associated tooling for advertising properties among Realtors in an area.

            The MLS is controlled by a Realtor Association or similar. This is basically all the Realtors/Brokers in an area working together. This is often a good place to concentrate some customer support and data integrity checks, compliance, etc..., for example.

            Then there are the Realtors who work with sellers to market properties to buyers, and work with buyers to find the properties and oversee showings, etc...

            Realtors vary in quality, for sure. Some sell 1-2 houses a year, some sell 1-2 houses a week.

            The system surely has a lot of problems. But, it also provides value in a lot of ways that aren't easy to just remove. So you want to list your own house? Who's going to take the photos? Are you aware of the applicable laws, say WRT commercial drone photography? Do you know what will get you sued if you say it in a listing? How are you going to pick the price? On the other hand, you want to buy a property by directly searching the MLS: are you up for signing the data sharing contracts required to give you access to that data? How are you going to structure the offer? Do you know what a love letter is and whether it's allowed as part of the offer? Do you know the difference between being pre-approved and pre-qualified? How are you going to get access to the property and are you going to accept liability for any damage/theft? If the owner is directly showing the property (they want to remove the Realtor as well), are you both up for staring at each other uncomfortably as you look through their house? :-)

            There's an awful lot of money that goes into the Realtor industry. But, if it were easy to get rid of, For Sale By Owner (FSBO) would be more popular. As far as I can tell, at least in my area, FSBO basically doesn't exist.

            (Full disclosure: Not a Realtor, SysAdmin to an MLS)

            • btreecat 1 year ago
              As someone who ran their own UAS company, realtors are the literal worst.

              No other industry is so cool with hiring uninsured, unlicensed, and under skilled individuals because they don't want to spend more than $50 total, including your time, transportation, and any editing.

              Most houses don't need drone shots, it's a particularly niche market, even for housing.

            • 2023throwawayy 1 year ago
              > Not all regional listing services are affected because some use data vendors other than Rapattoni.

              The headline here on HN seems inaccurate. The entire market is not halted.

              • ricberw 1 year ago
                Posted this based on an agent I know mentioning that she’s effectively taken the last four days off because the lack of MLS makes her job “nearly impossible to do properly.” She said many at her agency are doing the same.

                I wouldn’t be surprised if this shows up in major economic indicators this month.

                • nonethewiser 1 year ago
                  Major, sure, but 1 agency is 1 datapoint. Seems like a stretch though say the entire industry.
                  • bloopernova 1 year ago
                    Hmm. If big money got affected, does that mean we'll see some sweeping new laws soon?
                    • readthenotes1 1 year ago
                      Possibly, but I'm not hoping that they will improve anything
                  • linsomniac 1 year ago
                    In fact, Rapattoni is the smallest of the major MLSes. Behind Core Logic, Navica, FBS, and Black Knight, Rapattoni is used by 5% of the organizations. This graph is slightly misleading though, as it's by number of MLSes served, not by number of subscribers, and CoreLogic "Serves nearly half of the MLSes with more than 10,000 subscribers".

                    https://www.t360.com/insight/articles/the-2022-mls-system-te...

                    • 1 year ago
                      • awb 1 year ago
                        Anecdotal, but a Real estate agent friend of mine says he’s unaffected.
                        • ricberw 1 year ago
                          Fair, not entire market.
                      • mike503 1 year ago
                        Anyone worked with the MLS system? It's so archaic. At least the RMLS. Talk about technical debt.
                        • austinkhale 1 year ago
                          Worked on a team doing nationwide MLS feeds via a variety of sources eg IDX, VOW, etc. Feels like some sort of arcane art after a certain point trying to get everything to play nicely on a unified interface.
                          • danielvaughn 1 year ago
                            Same. It's a nightmare. We used Trestle, which was decent but still felt like an API from 2005.
                          • chasd00 1 year ago
                            > It's so archaic. ...Talk about technical debt.

                            you guys need to get in to medical/prescription claims billing, payments, and reconciliation. That's the real fun stuff right there.

                            • jimt1234 1 year ago
                              My girlfriend runs a medical provider company that bills through most major health insurance companies. One of these companies (a large, well-known insurer) will only accept payment requests by fax, M-F, 8am to 5pm. Yes, I'm serious. They still have a fax machine, and it gets unplugged everyday at 5pm.
                            • mistrial9 1 year ago
                              different US*MLS use different record formats -- there were several Federal level lawsuits on that topic too IIR
                            • kitanata 1 year ago
                              [flagged]
                              • politician 1 year ago
                                [flagged]
                                • jsutton 1 year ago
                                  Agreed, this is the kind of use case blockchain excels at. I worked on a project that attempted to do something like a distributed MLS, and we had major industry leaders on board indicating a large degree of belief that blockchain could revolutionize the industry. MLS is, after all, just a legacy federated system running on inertia.

                                  Unfortunately, it's so difficult to get a critical mass of inventory to succeed; it requires either a massive upfront investment, or partnering with RE developers from the beginning.

                                  • kjs3 1 year ago
                                    The niche was a poster child for disruption! The incumbent is an incompetent crushed under legacy debt! We had all the buzzwords! All the 'major industry leaders' thought we were awesome!

                                    Nothing came of it!

                                    Sounds like every blockchain proposal I've ever delt with.

                                    • jsutton 1 year ago
                                      Everyone said the same thing about ML/AI 5+ years ago. Hard things take time.
                                  • progman32 1 year ago
                                    Why is a blockchain better here, vs a normal database?
                                    • jsutton 1 year ago
                                      A normal database isn't able to be easily disseminated by the people who need access to this data, which is enormous. Then who gets to host it? Real Estate associations are too many, too fragmented, too entrenched to agree on one or even a handful of companies with the privilege to host this information.

                                      A blockchain (assuming you can get buy-in/critical mass from the agencies) has the ability to align some financial incentives of all interested parties to open up access to real estate listings while still holding ownership and profiting from that access.

                                      Instead of real estate companies protecting their listing data, they could offer access to their listing data in exchange for a fee or revenue share. Instead of out-of-date listings parading as up-to-date, there's a public temporal record of updates. Instead of buyers getting restricted or partial information, they can obtain access to the listing data via alternate sources.

                                    • symlinkk 1 year ago
                                      I don’t know how anyone could argue with you. The MLS is literally just a database of house listings. In some states you can only access it if you’re a realtor, solely to keep their job secure. Making it decentralized would open up that data for everyone.
                                      • danielvaughn 1 year ago
                                        It's a bit more complicated than that. One issue is that some information should only be shared between professionals. For instance, if a seller has a keypad entry, the listing will often contain the passcode for a buyers agent if they want to tour the house while the seller is away. That kind of information can't be shared publicly, so you need some degree of privacy control.
                                        • symlinkk 1 year ago
                                          Ok so keep that behind a gate and open up the rest. That’s a flimsy excuse. We are software engineers, we know how easy it would be to expose a subset of the data. It’s job security plain and simple. Same reason you can’t buy a car direct from the manufacturer and have to pay thousands in markup to some dealership that adds zero value.
                                        • jjtheblunt 1 year ago
                                          Does it work only if everyone holds credentials for viewing what's in the (centralized or decentralized) data records?
                                        • Dalewyn 1 year ago
                                          Please tell us how you're a cryptobro without saying you're a cryptobro.