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Comment by dpcan | Hacker News Reader

I hate to tell you this, but it has NOTHING to do with technology or even individual agents. The closed MLS has everything to do with politics. Period.

The biggest brokers in an area will monopolize 60%+ of all the data in a single MLS. When they have control over the listings, they have control over the MLS. If they threaten to leave an MLS, the MLS is worthless, and one company wins.

So, the MLS compromises. It does the bidding of the biggest listing offices and everyone else suffers.

I speak from first hand experience as a vendor in multiple markets. An open mls would be mind blowing and wonderful, bit it's not a matter of setting up a nice website, it's a matter of beating through the bureaucracy.

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I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem, and I independently arrived at the same conclusion. I know several agents and have spent a lot of time discussing the politics around the system.

This is absolutely NOT a technical problem. The real problem has several facets:

1. Politics. You covered this.

2. Agent resistance to change. This is a huge issue. Roughly 80% of agents I've encountered are tech neophytes and can hardly use their own existing MLS system, which hasn't changed in a decade. Technologists look at Web 2.0 as being an ease-of-use panacea, but this is a group of users that literally run away from anything new or different, especially technology. Not every agent falls in this category, but most do.

3. Most users see the existing MLS as good enough. Web nerds cringe when they see circa-1996 web UI and fully closed data silos. Agents see a system that technically gets the job done, even if it's a bit cumbersome. If you ask an average agent what his or her work-related biggest pain points are, the MLS UI will not be in the top 5.

You make an interesting comment about the larger brokers. In my area there is one that is, relatively speaking, bigger than the other 'big fish', but there are probably three or four "significant" brokerages, and a lot of smaller ones too.

What is it about the market that causes nominally entrepreneurial people (they're commission-driven after all) to tie themselves to a large brokerage that will eat a lot of their earnings?

Seems like the same political problems that are in place with Ticketmaster. Perhaps if someone figure out how to beat through this bureaucracy they can figure that one out, too.

And make lots of money.

There's actually a startup that's local to me that's fighting that fight.

What's interesting is that they haven't tried to go after big names at first... it's surely more of a long tail kind of thing. They started off only doing small, local venues, but they're doing so well that they're naturally starting to pick up bigger and bigger ones.

I'll be excited to see Ticketmaster go. I don't know of anynone who enjoys dealing with them.

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