MLS is the biggest monopoly in Canada
And the problem is that you can’t do anything about it, or can you?
How the Competition Bureau saw it in 2010
In 2010, the federal #Competition Bureau threatened to completely flip the script and change the realty game. After years of investigations and talks, it said it was taking the rule-making Canadian #Real Estate Association to the competition tribunal for anti-competitive behaviour.
At that time, any upstart that wanted to offer anything other than full service (i.e. get their mass commissions) was threatened using lawsuits to shut them down, as the #Toronto Real Estate Board has done.
The myriad of reasons that #TREB used to justify these law suits was laughable; unscrupulous discount brokers could exaggerate the square footage, for example. They said the (then) current system protected buyers and sellers by ensuring they have the help, advice and full services of a seasoned real-estate agent.
Analogous to equities trading (of the past)
Anyone can use E*TRADE and the like from their homes, meaning only wealthier investors who need specialized advice pay big fees for their own stockbroker. In other words, you are free to trade to your heart’s content on your own computer, but you make your decisions at your own risk.
In real estate, similar services exist now in the United States, where the rules have been loosened.
The result would be a more two-tiered #market. Some people would rely on discount real-estate outfits. Meanwhile, high-end real-estate agents would flourish, and perhaps even charge more. The hope was that this would replace the one-size-fits-all situation from back then, where everyone buying or selling a house is forced to pay the same rates, no matter how useful the real-estate agent is (and that is incredibly subjective – especially if you’re not a novice).
But you still needed #MLS
The reality is that, at any point in the past, you could very easily (well, if you knew how) setup a website and list houses for sale privately. Unfortunately (and credit to CREA, OREA, TREB, etc… for their marketing efforts) Realtor.ca is the place where, according to estimates, well over 90 per cent of sellers and buyers do their business, so good luck!
Pressure has long been building on TREB to open up its data to everyone. If that happens, buying a home in the future could mean less driving in circles with your real-estate agent and more time navigating your laptop, or even your iPhone, for properties. A whole new sector of Web-based real estate services could flourish, like Redfin.com in the United States.
Competition Bureau vs TREB
Then in 2016 the Commissioner of Competition, the federal agency tasked with advocating for the rights of Canadian consumers, won their abuse of dominance case against the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) after fighting for years to have sales data made accessible to the public.
At the heart of the Competition Bureau’s argument was that TREB stifles industry competition by restricting who gets full, easy access to housing market data. In an effort to increase competition within the real estate market, the Competition Bureau argued for open, easy access to housing data—data that lives on the Multiple Listings Service (MLS), a suite of services that enables a seller to market their property to multiple buyers in the open market.
During the legal fight, TREB had continued arguing that by allowing the public unrestricted access to housing market data, they would violate the privacy of clients—sellers who list their home for sale and buyers who enter into a contractual agreement to purchase a property.
Then a stay order by Toronto Real Estate Board
Of course, the amount of money that the realtor board has prompted what you might have expected – a stay order in the court of appeals. Stay order by the Federal Court of Appeal of its dismissal of an appeal by the Toronto Real Estate Board. The Board has some issues respecting the Just Sold report which we are attempting to resolve.
iListMLS
As mentioned in prior posts, we at iListMLS are on a mission to help the consumer get all the information they need to make a truly informed decision. We don’t believe in #realtors being gatekeepers of the entire system and, once registered with us, you will have access to a lot of data and (very specifically) intelligence about the entire real estate market in the #GTA. We are not at all like some realtors who will simply send you newsletters or comparative market analysis, we build tools based on decades of Big Data, Machine Learning and #Artificial Intelligence know-how by some of the world’s best technologists, that get you laser focused and arm you with even more knowledge than just about every one of the 40,000+ realtors in the GTA.
Automation coming soon
We’re at the tail end of building our estimation tool which will automatically scour all the listings in an area and forecast what your property will be worth, with an accuracy much, much higher than any realtor would.
Our valuation tools place every single home that we have in our database (approximately 3 million homes) and uses this data to create actual estimates of the true value of your home (taking into account everything from location, age, neighbourhood, demographics, census data and city planning). To create this valuation in those 3 million homes, our algorithms run about once a week on super powerful GPU computers, where we push several terabytes of data through a deep learning (read Artificial Intelligence) model (as opposed to our earlier efforts which were based on shallow machine learning and about 13,000 statistical models), which was, compared to what had been done previously an enormously more computationally sophisticated process.
The hidden story of achieving that is by collecting enormously more data and getting a lot more sophisticated algorithmically, which requires us to use more computers.
We never go above a city level for the deep learning algorithms, and large cities and metropolitan centers, with many transactions, we break those down into smaller areas within the city (not just neighbourhoods) where the algorithms try to find homogeneous sets of homes in the subsections to train a modeling framework.
The combination of the valuation approach and a superb classification algorightm together create a model, and there are a bunch of these models generated at that subsection of a city’s geography.
Finding listings with Lizty could not be any easier
Another great benefit of working with us is that you will have the ability to pick and choose homes based on your exact needs and our algorithms will help tailor the experience for you (as per the below):
And we also have a mobile application coming that is going to revolutionize the way in which home owners and home buyers are shown and choose homes. Unfortunately we are currently unwilling to show any screenshots of this as we have not yet patented the idea and fear that it may be stolen by our competition.
Selling with Lizty is a breeze as well
Having gone through and filled out the paperwork ourselves many times, we also thought that it would be so much easier for the public to do this on our web forms, so we created that. As part of our platform, and free to all our users, when you are putting your listing on MLS, all you need to do is use #Lizty, our AI realtor, which will guide you through the entire process, while explaining ALL the clauses and rules that you need to know – thus doing a WAY better job than the majority of deal-hungry realtors in Toronto.
Once you’ve made the (right) decision to list with us and put your mere posting on MLS via our platform, here are the tips that you’ll need for a wonderful listing, maximum exposure and top sale.
iListMLS building Valery – a valuation genius
Luckily for all clients of iListMLS, we use Artificial Intelligence to do a better job at assessing your home’s value than any realtor would through their Comparative Market Analyses (CMA – a marketing tool used to suck you into a listing meeting with that realtor).
#Valery herself takes into account all of the above, plus city planning, demographics and upwards of 200 other data sets which most realtors and brokerages never have access to (or would even think of looking at). She is much more accurate and makes this valuation piece a cinch for you during your mere listing.
Valery not only gives you a high degree of confidence of the value of your home, she also knows intimately the neighbourhood and how much you might expect your area to go up in the new few months and years based on many factors. This can help you decide whether or not it truly is time to sell your home now or wait for a possible inflationary boom in value in your area.
Expected release
We are looking to be ready to start working with clients in July 2018 and will be releasing all our services throughout the end of the year. We expect that it will take a gargantuan effort to achieve this, but we have ramped up our spending and financing considerably (on things that empower you, not our marketing efforts) in order to get us there.
Stay tuned and make sure to pop back in weekly to read more about the journey to empowering the consumer; you!
