09th Jul 2007
MLSonopoly?
While not your typically Classified site but MLS.ca or the Multiple Listing Service cannot be ignored. The MLS.ca site is run by CREA ( Canadian Real Estate Association ) and made up of smaller regional Real Estate boards. MLS.ca continues to dominate Canadian Real Estate searches and has a reputation for not sharing its real estate listings. The site itself its protected by a very aggressive terms of service and privacy policy. Many sites have been shutdown that have attempted to access the MLS listings and to our knowledge there have been no agreements with any other sites to access their listing data.
Recently MLS.ca has taken the unusual step of removing itself from Search Engines. The site has changed their Robots.txt ( as of July 9, 2007 ) to indicate:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The effect is that no search engines ( yes, including Google ) can index the MLS listings without ignoring the robots.txt. Its not clear how MLS believes this could benefit consumers or its member Real Estate agents, that are dependent on advertising their listings. We know that Canadians conduct about 33 million web searches daily, compared to 406 million in the US, and 80% of all internet traffic starts from search engines. It would appear to be suicide to be turning off search engine indexing if you’re interested in servicing the general public…
MLS.ca has also updated the design on their listing page. The sites legal agreements prevent us from display screen shots but you can see the old listing design here:
The new design has changed a number of elements. The address is not longer prominent at the top and the 7 photos on the listing page have been replaced with 4. We could not see any new data being added to the new listing design. For example its still not possible to clearly see if parking is available for most Toronto properties.
Its not clear who MLS is listening to with these design changes but they don’t appear to be consumer facing. Many agents have complained about the process of uploading photos and some agents prefer to advertise without the disclosing the property address. Maybe MLS.ca is listening to agents instead of consumers?
We hope MLS.ca will change its direction and consider sharing listings with other companies so that we can see legitimate competitors in the space and not the monopoly that seems to be developing.
While not your typically Classified site but MLS.ca or the Multiple Listing Service cannot be ignored. The MLS.ca site is run by CREA ( Canadian Real Estate Association ) and made up of smaller regional Real Estate boards. MLS.ca continues to dominate Canadian Real Estate searches and has a reputation for not sharing its real estate listings. The site itself its protected by a very aggressive terms of service and privacy policy. Many sites have been shutdown that have attempted to access the MLS listings and to our knowledge there have been no agreements with any other sites to access their listing data.
Recently MLS.ca has taken the unusual step of removing itself from Search Engines. The site has changed their Robots.txt ( as of July 9, 2007 ) to indicate:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
The effect is that no search engines ( yes, including Google ) can index the MLS listings without ignoring the robots.txt. Its not clear how MLS believes this could benefit consumers or its member Real Estate agents, that are dependent on advertising their listings. We know that Canadians conduct about 33 million web searches daily, compared to 406 million in the US, and 80% of all internet traffic starts from search engines. It would appear to be suicide to be turning off search engine indexing if you’re interested in servicing the general public…
MLS.ca has also updated the design on their listing page. The sites legal agreements prevent us from display screen shots but you can see the old listing design here:
The new design has changed a number of elements. The address is not longer prominent at the top and the 7 photos on the listing page have been replaced with 4. We could not see any new data being added to the new listing design. For example its still not possible to clearly see if parking is available for most Toronto properties.
Its not clear who MLS is listening to with these design changes but they don’t appear to be consumer facing. Many agents have complained about the process of uploading photos and some agents prefer to advertise without the disclosing the property address. Maybe MLS.ca is listening to agents instead of consumers?
We hope MLS.ca will change its direction and consider sharing listings with other companies so that we can see legitimate competitors in the space and not the monopoly that seems to be developing.
Posted by colin under 
News, Real Estate 
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