So, obviously I’ve become a bit addicted to Yahoo Pipes. This free tool lets you aggregate, organize, and filter data from an unlimited number of RSS feeds and databases and present it in almost any kind of electronic form you can imagine.
I’ve found a really good use for it, one which is – amazingly – missing from the vast majority of real estate listing sites. Redfin, Zillow, Realtor.com and all the others: you are really letting the entire industry down by not having raw MLS data available as an RSS feed! I just could not believe that in an age when so many of us get our data on mobile devices and from feed readers that these firms wouldn’t have easily-configurable custom RSS feeds of their listings, but sure enough they don’t. Ziprealty is one of the very few to have such a useful feature, and more power to them for it.
Using Ziprealty’s listings, house-for-sale posts on Craigslists in a dozen markets and a few other small sites here and there, I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe that includes only listings self-described as "Craftsman," "Mission," "Prairie," or "bungalow." Now, if I can only figure out how to include photos of each property…
If you are an agent, a broker or an MLS firm, please publish your data as a configurable / custom RSS feed. This way, searches that could take hours can be finished in just a minute or two, and users don’t need to revisit the sites every single day – using a service like feedburner or one of the many rss-to-email services, we can be notified only when our search criteria pop up in a market we are interested in, in our price range.
And if you know of any listings services that do issue their data as an RSS feed, please share that info in the comments section below – I’d love to add them to the pipe. Also, let me know if you’d like me to include other cities’ Craigslist posts, I can do that pretty easily.
If this tool is useful to you and if you think other folks might find it interesting, please digg it:
Hi,
If the RSS feed could map the MLS listed houses on google maps or other maps.Nothing could beat it.
Pri
You’re right. It’d be great if we could pipe that info directly into a google map – it’d be the best real estate research tool on the market, especially if you could layer that on top of property tax info!
Hi there, do you know if it is legal to dispaly mls listings through a rss feed if you are not a member of the mls. Also, do I need permission to advertise other agency’s listings?
Thanks, Theresa Bryan
Hi Theresa. I am told by the people who run MLS that any listing an agent puts up on MLS is then free to display by anyone else using a legal MLS service. So, there you go.
I think the permission thing is a regular nicety, but as long as you don’t suggest that you are the agent of record I don’t think you’re stepping on anyone’s toes.
Re: “Content, Writing and Copyright” (forum discussion)
Dear Joshua,
I saw your posts in a forum discussion on “Content, Writing and Copyright”, here:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/content_copywriting/3358581-2-30.htm
I was unable to reply to your comments there (my account, being new, is not yet “eligible to participate in forums”). But I appreciated your contributions to that discussion. And I thought that this might be of interest to you:
“The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that “faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain”. For details, see Commons:When to use the PD-Art tag.
This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain.
Please be aware that depending on local laws, re-use of this content may be prohibited or restricted in your jurisdiction. See Commons:Reuse of PD-Art photographs.”
From: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liber_Iudiciorum_visigòtic.png
I may be writing an article about these issues. If you wouldn’t mind contacting me, if you would be willing to spend a couple of minutes discussing issues of this nature, I would be grateful.
You can reach me at a@beaderie.com.
Thank you so much for your time.
Genève Gil
Check out RSS2HTML.COM for ways to have the RSS feed include images.
The reason the mls doesn’t offer rss is because they want to control the data and force realtors into paying them for the data (yep even their own data). It’s a big good old boy network of people who are forced to use different versions of the mls depending on which one their board of realtors picks. Every area has a different board of realtors, and to become a member, you gotta pay. It’s all about the bucks fellas. But, if you are skilled at programming, you could “jury rig” an rss feed by using regex to parse the data on the mls site, then dump it to an xml file and read it from an rss aggregator … I successfully did this once, but once the usamls.net service figured out what I was doing, they changed the data so I would have to rewrite the regex and it became too cumbersome so I stopped messing with it. I’m not a great programmer but I did manage to get it to work, I just got too frustrated with it and stopped messing with it. If you want the source code (php) to tweak , shoot me an email and I’ll get it to you.
Mark,
Thanks for your helpful info on when the MLS does not send out rss feeds.
You mentioned that you have regex code.
If it is easily available I would like to have a copy of it.
My email address is tbarrettx1@gmail.com
I am a realtor and had created a mls search site but see that they (the mls) has changed some three or four time apparently in order to defeat our local site’s search abilities.
( http://www.islandconnectionsrealtycom/areasearch.htm )
I see that they are requiring form parameters now instead of url parameters and I don’t know how to send form data when reading through php
Thanks,
Tobin Barrett
tbarrettx1@gmail.com
843 889-9000 Ext 100