Hacker News Reader

Comment by rgbrgb | Hacker News Reader

Founders are on deck to answer any questions you guys have. We're really excited to be in YC!

Hi guys. Cool site. Quick question - and I completely understand if you can't answer - any more details on your plans for expanding MLS coverage, or particulars on your current data arrangements?

Just curious because I know some realtors and it seems like the barrier to a national MLS equivalent has been opposition by industry organizations wanting to protect their data. Any thoughts?

Getting MLS data is hard. We had to become a registered California brokerage and join individual MLS organizations as participating agents. Each MLS runs on different servers with slightly different SOAP/XML APIs and slightly different data formats. We're ingesting from 3 right now in real-time. We're planning to get full CA coverage this way in the next month or so (CA is 15% of the national real estate market).

We might have a different approach when we scale nationally but so far this is working pretty well. There are a few third party companies that offer the data but it's not as fast or complete as a brokerage feed from the MLS (and speed matters in hot CA markets).

That said, we don't need the property in our system to put an offer on it so you can shop on Redfin or Zillow and come back to our site when you want to put a bid in. We will happily put an offer in on any home in California.

Doesn't the MLS feed follow the RET specification ?

So there's not one MLS feed, it's a separate feed for each of the 950 national MLS organizations. In theory they follow the RET specification but in practice there are different versions of the spec and they don't all follow it exactly.

First, good luck on your business.

My question: How's this different from something like helpusell.com?

I used Helpusell over a decade ago in California. They saved me a nice chunk of change because the agent was smart, but ultimately the buyer came from listing on MLS and not their site. MLS drove buyers to my property very quickly.

Thanks! We love new models like helpusell.

We're coming at it from the other side -- we're completely focused on buyers. You can input any address in California and we'll make your offer. The listings we have on our site are straight from the MLS (we have 100% coverage in LA and SF right now). However, you can shop on Redfin, Trulia, or Zillow and put the offer in or schedule a showing through our site.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com