Where do I find MLS data feeds?

March 19, 2011 7:28 PM

I'm looking for an MLS data service provider, does one exist? Something similar to SmartQuant for financial data?

I'm looking for properties in a specific region, if that matters. I'm willing to pay for this, but I cannot find anything. Historical data would be nice, but if I could get just "ticks" (house goes on the market at a price on a date, house closed at a price on a date), that is fine.

posted by geoff. to computers & internet (4 answers total)

If it's historical data you want, you may be better off hacking together some combo of registry of deeds data and old listings ... A lot of the web services keep listings hanging around for months, long after the house has sold, and if you're just trying to get a sense of how prices have moved in a given neighborhood that might be enough. If you're looking to study this more systemically, that might be difficult -- CoreLogic and RealtyTrac are the big data service providers. They're quite expensive, though. And IIRC, even they don't necessarily have asking price data, for that you usually need the MLS and MLSs won't give it out to non-members, real estate being a cartel... Some MLSs have associate memberships for appraisers and vendors, you might be able to get in that way without having a real estate license. Easiest way, of course, would be to be friends with a realtor that would let you access the listings through them...
posted by Diablevert at 8:18 PM on March 19, 2011

I and the husband got the data from a real estate agent. It was all the mls data for the previous year and up to the cuurent. Data was used to do regression modeling. We were able to determine if too much money was being asked or if the property was being undervalued. The mls data was outputted to a spreadsheet.
posted by jadepearl at 10:04 PM on March 19, 2011

Try Zillow.com or Redfin.com. They have historical data for house sales (at least for my county).
posted by ShooBoo at 8:16 AM on March 20, 2011

Sorry, you're looking for the raw data itself, which I don't think Zillow or Redfin provide. But you may be able to do some screenscraping from their sites.
posted by ShooBoo at 8:51 AM on March 20, 2011