We created a mini MLS and I'm curious why no one has considered the same. In fact when I was referred to this forum I thought I'd find all kinds of similar endeavors. Here is how ours transpired.

Nearly 16 (sixteen) years ago while working in the graphics department for a printing company, I was doing a quality thumb through (that’s scanning through the publication off the press for errors) with one of our clients Free Real Estate rag sheets when I noticed something interesting and a bit unusual.

The publication had a requirement that the only people who could advertise were MLS members or Board of Realtors members. Being such, you had to put your MLS Property ID with each property advertisement you published. I discovered that nearly 10% of all listings did not have MLS numbers and found the reason to be that MLS was not available in the outline county where the properties were listed.

Two years later after working with a lawyer associate of mine on his Wildcat BBS for legal document exchange we came up with the idea of using a BBS system along with a few dial up nodes to create a mini-MLS in the outline county where MLS was not available.

After tons of research and a bit of trial and error we finally settled on the Excalibur BBS software solution to create our mini MLS. Long story short, the BBS had a dialer client that fit on a single floppy disk making it available for any realtor with a minimum of an i386 PC and a 14.4 modem.

Now, years later, as the expansion of the Big City MLS to that county the former members of our mini MLS have long since moved on. To this day I still have that Excalibur BBS system in archive all setup to work as an MLS and once in a while when working with a real estate client and their ignorant MLS providers I wonder,,, why hasn't anyone tried to compete with MLS's.

Is there some license, law, requirement, situation or mandate that prevents a person from developing an MLS that works for the realtor and the home owner? I mean I'm no super genius but I have often considered developing a PHP / MySQL or even ASP.NET software solution to accommodate this. Everyone I talk to say I'm in over my head. I'd like to know why?

If its technology, then believe me we are well past Excalibur BBS software. Even the age old wild cat legal document exchange for attorneys has graduated to the web with the new site www.easyweblaw.com but the same would be true of a new kind of MLS. Maybe call it RELS or PLS?!

Jared