Real Estate Forums

Webmasters Toolkit What tools do you use for working with search engines and tracking your results?

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 08-02-2005, 10:12 AM
ultraviolet16 ultraviolet16 is offline
Real Estate Nu-bee
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 12
ultraviolet16 is on a distinguished road
Default regional/national databases

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
Reply With Quote
Old 08-02-2005, 10:29 AM
chachi chachi is offline
Real Estate Web Guru
 
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 391
chachi is on a distinguished road
Default Re: regional/national databases

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.
Reply With Quote
Old 08-02-2005, 06:39 PM
ultraviolet16 ultraviolet16 is offline
Real Estate Nu-bee
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 12
ultraviolet16 is on a distinguished road
Default Re: regional/national databases

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..
Reply With Quote
Old 08-02-2005, 06:47 PM
ultraviolet16 ultraviolet16 is offline
Real Estate Nu-bee
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 12
ultraviolet16 is on a distinguished road
Default Re: regional/national databases

also is there any connection between idx and foxpro that anyone knows of?
Reply With Quote
Old 08-02-2005, 08:55 PM
KSA KSA is offline
Real Estate Web Guru
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Atlanta
Posts: 360
KSA is on a distinguished road
Default Re: regional/national databases

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
__________________
Kathleen Allardyce
Visit our BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog
Real Estate Marketing
Point 2 Agent Partner
Reply With Quote
Old 08-03-2005, 06:53 PM
gordhead gordhead is offline
Real Estate WebMaster
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Tampa
Posts: 166
gordhead is on a distinguished road
Default Re: regional/national databases

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.
__________________
Tampa Real Estate
Reply With Quote
Old 08-03-2005, 11:23 PM
ultraviolet16 ultraviolet16 is offline
Real Estate Nu-bee
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 12
ultraviolet16 is on a distinguished road
Default Re: regional/national databases

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.
Reply With Quote
Old 08-04-2005, 05:25 AM
gordhead gordhead is offline
Real Estate WebMaster
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Tampa
Posts: 166
gordhead is on a distinguished road
Default Re: regional/national databases

Think dom / xpath in liu of using lynx
__________________
Tampa Real Estate
Reply With Quote
Old 08-04-2005, 06:52 AM
chachi chachi is offline
Real Estate Web Guru
 
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 391
chachi is on a distinguished road
Default Re: regional/national databases

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.
Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

REW Conference

For our members

Main Sections

IDX Coverage Areas

Spiders Welcome

All times are GMT -7. The time now is 09:39 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2008, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.