regional/national databases

[ultraviolet16]

Hello everyone.. I'm a perl programmer that wanted to make charts and graphs based on land and resedential property values (selling prices) in different regions (particularly in florida). I just wanted to graph price increases over each year and compare which small regions have the highest probability to give the highest returns in invested capital. Is there anywhere I can pull this data from for my scripts? I'm clueless here

[chachi]

That is the kind of data you will most likely have to pay for. Dataquick and other data aggregators might be a good place to start. Some MLS boards will allow you to download data and then you would have to get some kind of zip code/mapping data set to do the rest. Just might take some work on your part.

[ultraviolet16]

Well I wasn't expecting a free pass chachi.. =)

How does the idx work..? what does it stand for, who made it, who owns it, why is it free.. any good links to find this info out, cause I think this is what i want... other than that i found this..

http://www.realtor.org/prodser.nsf/O...rm&IN=E187-175

tell me what you think..

[ultraviolet16]

also is there any connection between idx and foxpro that anyone knows of?

[KSA]

Ultraviolet,

I can help with some of your questions. IDX stands for Internet Data Exchange. It is software that allows listings from different brokers on the MLS to be displayed on a website. It is a term that defines the type of system. Therefore, no one owns it.

Several vendors provide IDX capabilities: Listingware, MLSFinder, and there are a lot of others, those are the only 2 I can think of off the top of my head.

I'm not sure where you heard that IDX is free. Each vendor charges for access to their system.

However, I don't think an IDX system will help you do what you need to do. The underlying data is owned by each individual MLS board. The MLS board is the one that has historical data such as what homes have sold for. For example, in Florida, Listingware works with the following boards:

Emerald Coast MLS, Emerald Coast
Regional MLS, Florida, Palm Beach Gardens
East Bay MLS, Panama City
Pensacola MLS, Pensacola


So, unless someone can post who knows more about it than I do, I am thinking you'd have to make an agreement with all the boards, and that could take forever. You might be better off checking into Dataquick et al.

Hope this helps.

Kathleen

[gordhead]

You do NOT get sold data via IDX. If your purpose is as described do not waste your time or money subscribing to IDX data feeds.

I would recommend finding other sources. For the Tampa area GTAR posts local sold stats here http://www.gtar.org/mls.htm I would suggest that you search for local realtor organizations and get the data from them. It would be fairly trivial to scrape that page into a database and maintain a much broader range of statistics from that.

[ultraviolet16]

wow thanks a lot for that information, to both KSA and gordhead. gordhead.. that's exactly what I was looking for.. that site is amazing, there must be something for other parts of fl. If I can only get that data for the tampa area then that's the only place I'll invest. I think tampa and naples, tampa sooner, are both regions that are going to flurish as far as real estate appreciation is concerned--- given the market stays bullish.

But about your point on stripping the sites and storing info into a local database-- I considered it. I thought about making a perl script that would run a text internet browser (like lynx) to search the site using a regular expression to filter out the data I wanted. I considered doing this for sites allowing idx searches so I won't have to pay for the service and get the data i wanted. I even went as far as thinking about spreading out the hits i would make to one site durring the day so that spikes in traffic wouldn't make an admin raise his eye brows. But anyways, I thought that would be unethical. Although ripping that gtar site wouldn't be wrong since they just give you the data. so I'll probably do that to test the script. I found an alternative though...

http://www.realtor.org/prodser.nsf/O...rm&IN=E187-175

That database seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. Has all the historical data and everything I was searching for. Kinda pricey though. We'll see after I make my first investment. But anyways, i found some good free things at the NAR website. Includding this:

http://www.realtor.org/Research.nsf/Pages/MetroPrice

gordhead check out Bradenton as compared to other us cities.. amazing.

[gordhead]

Think dom / xpath in liu of using lynx

[chachi]

I believe ultraviolet was referring to a system we have built (that is free) called IDX Free, not sure how that came into this thread. I have not seen an MLS board that will give out sales data via FTP/IDX data sources, so I think you are on the right track with that NAR product or using the local boards' sales data if it is available for all of the areas you work. You might also want to check out Money Magazine's Real Estate Guide (June each year). It is the only reason I subscribe to the magazine. They do a pretty good job of evaluating hundreds of markets all across the country and forecast as well.