How to get data from MLS?

[Michael Stole]

Hi, BPers, I have been hanging around this forum for a while, and get many answers and helps from here. Now I need another big help.

I am a part time investor as well as an economic analyst. I am right now doing a research studying the residential real estate market, and need some data. The ideal data would be a list of detailed information about all the houses been sold in a given city during a given period.

I myself is not an agent, so I resort to my local MLS center on getting the data. But they told me they were not able to give me the data with that much detail. Well, I can go with a less detailed data, but detailed information will be much much better. So I still wanna try my best to persuade them, and I can sign a confidentiality agreement. But before I do that, I would like to know the chance of success and what the best way is to persuade them.

Well, my wife is an real estate agent, so yes, I can easilly get the data from my wife. But I have to know for sure whether it is legal for me to get the data from my agent wife. If I used the data, and the research get published, are they able to sue me for that? The bottomline is I dont want any legal trouble. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

FYI, the research is pure academic, and not for profit.

[Chris Martin]

If I understand correctly, you want to find out specifics of houses (or property in general) that has been sold in a select area. The short answer is that most of the information in most states is public record. If you are really ambitious, you can search all the public records and "see" all of the specifics of all transactions that occur in your select area. BTW, I have done this with automated crawlers (I have a CS degree) and collected tens of thousands of public records that allow me to analyze the data based on whatever queries I am looking for. The bottom line is there is no legal issue, IMO. It's public record.