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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

> Realty sucks due to the MLS monopoly

Would we say that nasdaq or the NYSE cause trading to suck? Because listing services are just the real estate equivalent: a market. I don’t think the public fully appreciates how these services came about to reduce information asymmetry in North American real estate - many countries don’t even have listing services. We pay for their existence as realtors, you the public benefit in information that once upon a time only existed in the private files of realtors. I can’t begin to imagine why you think Zillow is being held back by listing services or why you would hold Redfin up as some kind of model.

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NYSE is publically available information from the exchange directly. Listing services lock listings behind portals only accessible to agents that are members of NAR, the general public has no access to those listings or that data.

There is still much information asymmetry in NA real estate as many metropolitan regions may feature 2, 3, or more MLSs. The state of Georgia has 25 MLSs in total, of which few, if any, share their listings with each other. So an agent in Atlanta who is a member of FMLS, has to pay $300 or more (plus a broker paying $800+) to become a member of the Golden Isles MLS if they have a client that wants to sell in Savannah, or even if they themselves want to buy in that area.

Zillow is what helps reduce this information asymmetry on a national scale, but they have to pay licensing fees to these individual MLSs/NAR to access that information. As NAR requires agents to list properties on their local MLS (and advocates against posting on other sites separately), NAR creates a market where Zillow is reliant on them, and NAR becomes the arbiter of who has access to what information. Information that, for no reason, should really be remaining available to the general public.

NYSE's real time data is a paid product. Their free quotes are delayed, and available anywhere (Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, your brokerage, etc)

While real-time data is paid, publicly available data is only delayed by 20 minutes. MLS data is never publicly available, unless you are a licensed agent, a member of your local Board of Realtors, a member of NAR, and lastly a member of that specific MLS.

Realtors take a huge commission (~6% of sales price) for the work that they do, and one of the pillars of this enterprise is exclusive, monopolistic access to MLS.

If you're selling, there's an enormous pressure to get listed on MLS to get picked up. And then you're opted into paying middlemen.

Realtors will pressure sales, sometimes against buyers' or sellers' interests.

Realtors earn more in areas of higher home prices -- sometimes 2-5 times more -- , despite the workload being fungible across the state in which they practice.

Realtors are like travel agents, except extremely expensive, and a near market monopoly.

> We pay for their existence as realtors

Oh, you're a realtor!

> I can’t begin to imagine why you think Zillow is being held back by listing services or why you would hold Redfin up as some kind of model.

What do you think would happen if Zillow and Redfin could scrape MLS without restriction? Recent data -- not the days to months of stale info that is par for the course with MLS.

What if they could use this MLS data and also allow for sellers to post on their platforms without a realtor representative?

Because that's what should happen. That's an efficient market.

Typical realtor response. It's simple, realtors use MLS monopoly to earn more than their fair share of the profit. It's not an open market.

> We pay for their existence as realtors

Doesn't this mean that buyer pays for their existence?

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