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A comment on Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B. Parent comment

Re:Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B by chatmasta on Monday July 28, 2014 @10:51AM (#8097041)
> Isn't the MLS run by the real estate agents that RedFin is trying to disrupt?

Redfin is disrupting the brokerage model of paying agents price-based commission. As far as I can tell, they are happy to use the existing MLS for listing data, and then put a nice interface on top of it.

> Are you sure that Zillow isn't just scraping the MLS data from broker sites?

Oh, I'm sure they are. But they can't reasonably do this for 100% of regions, and have 100% coverage. My point about the coverage differentiator of Redfin is that in the regions Redfin serves, it has 100% coverage. Zillow claims to serve nationwide, but does not have 100% coverage nationwide.

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Re:Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B by toomuchtodo on Monday July 28, 2014 @03:12PM (#8098761)
> Redfin is disrupting the brokerage model of paying agents price-based commission. As far as I can tell, they are happy to use the existing MLS for listing data, and then put a nice interface on top of it.

Not only that, but they're storing the data forever. You can see every time a property is listed, the price changes, status changes to contingent, sale prices, everything.

You don't get that with the MLS system.

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