How to create your own MLS database for FREE (without access to the MLS)

[Cory Land]

This is geared for anyone who is tech savy and maybe even a software engineer. This whole thing took me about 40 hours to write. I am not expecting anyone to actually do this but I am interested to see the feedback I get - techies or not. I also didn't create this to market and sell but to be able to run statistics and analytics for my own real estate investing purposes. We are in a new age and finding a competitive edge using technology is extremely important and necessary. Disclaimer: access to MLS through your licensed real estate agent will be a much better resource but this at least let's you get to play with the data. This does not update when houses are sold which sucks but I have not found any way around this 1) sign up for access to Redfin.com 2) create general search for area your market (I do city of Philly and all surrounding suburbs from $0-$500k) 3) find link for RSS feed for your saved search 4) write program to absorb the RSS feed every minute or so 5) parse MLS data and store on database 6) create front end to view data 7) optional: create notification service for your specific search criteria - mine also generates comps using zillow and google map images automatically (both sites have RESTful api which handle MLS data nicely)