Multiple Listing Service
From Real Estate
MLS stands for Multiple Listing Service. The main site for the National Association of Realtors hosts a nation-wide search engine, which will let you search the local databases of any member associations. Apparently you can license the search capability from the National organization for a fee, but licensed board members of local boards (local Associations of Realtors) can usually access their own databases for no charge beyond their membership fees. At least, that is the case with our local board, and that of a few others whose sites I stumbled across in my research.
There are two basic ways of accessing MLS data. The first is a periodic ftp download of the entire database to your server (or that of your ISP). You are then responsible for creating your own search utilities and providing a web interface on your site. In my research (limited though it may be) only brokers were allowed to do this.
The second method is to frame the search forms provided by the local Association. In my area at least, this is available to all members in good standing. The results of the search appear in the same frame. While this works fine, you are limited to the form layout and 'look and feel' of the local board's site, along with whatever links, images, or even ads that they want to include. I'm experimenting with ways of, er, enhancing the user interface for such framed searches. As with the RSS discussion, I'll post a link when I have something worth showing off. --Jp
2005/11/11 - I'm almost done with the 'enhancements' mentioned above. I'm using cgi (written in python), which acts as a client, requests pages from FAAR (Flint's Board of Realtors), tweaks these pages a bit, and incorporates them into my site's pages. You can see it in action here. Aside from removing unwanted links and images and making sure our own contact information appears alongside the search results*, I'm actually doing some other optimizations as well. For example, I remove empty lines and lines with only whitespace, and html comments. It's possible that for viewers with slow (dial-up) connections, the page from my site might actually load faster than if they had gone directly to FAAR - if the overhead involved in getting and parsing the information over a broadband connection is less than the reduced bandwidth used by the parsed pages, that is. I have not done any kind of time trials, however. Oh yeah - the resultant pages do not use frames. Update - 2006/07/03 - Well, FAAR has decided they don't like the changes I was making to the data that was displayed, like making the email links all point to our agent's address, so they are insisting we utilize their template code. It works, but of course unless you use frames, the results open up a full page, no longer within our menu and header context. So, I'm back to frames. Ironically, the results as displayed from the template code are doing exactly what my frameless cgi did - the email contacts all point to our agent. Go figure.
- Note - most Real Estate boards govern the way you can present search results listed by other agencies on your site. Ours simply specifies that the listing agency name be shown in the same font size as our contact information in conjunction with the listed property - a rule with which I'll happily comply.
Addendum, 2005/11/18 - I am using a similar technique to serve our company listings. Rather than maintain our own listings, I just link to the MLS site with office_name = our agency's name as a search parameter. The results look just like any other search results, only including our listings. This site is now live, and you can see what I mean at http://www.1003concepts.com - click on All Listings. (Note - I had to remove this as I couldn't get it to work with the templates our board makes us use.)
