Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
Two boards carry the same house under different keys, in different address formats, with local status vocabularies that each collapse into one standard status value. The agent holds a different member identifier in each board, which is why a production report built from both counts one closing twice. Deduplication is a join on the parcel identifier where a board publishes one and on a normalised address where it does not. Worth knowing before you begin: each feed stays governed by the rules of the board it came from, so the merged store has to carry that provenance and some boards will not allow their listings to sit in a combined display at all.
A brokerage runs on dates that were calculated by a person reading a contract, and on leads that arrive in a different shape from every portal.
The listing data is already structured. It lives in the MLS, and since RETS was retired the modern way to reach it is the RESO Web API, which returns OData against the RESO Data Dictionary. Almost nothing else in the transaction is structured. The purchase agreement arrives as a signed PDF that was structured data inside the forms platform ten minutes earlier and got flattened on the way out.
- MLS via the RESO Web API
- Google Sheets
- Slack
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if the brokerage sits inside one board with no overlap at the edges, which describes most offices. This pays where an office straddles a metropolitan boundary, and it stops being a reporting exercise and becomes a licensing conversation the moment the merged data is used for anything beyond display.
The constraint that shapes it
Negotiating, advising on price or terms, and soliciting are licensed activities performed under a supervising broker. More on how this sector works.
Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling
- Rebuilding a billable day from the trail the systems already keep
- Assembling the monthly three way trust reconciliation packet
- Matching refrigerant bought against refrigerant put into equipment
- Finding the parts the truck says it still has
- Joining one client across the ledger and the tax file
- How do I merge two MLS feeds without listing the same house twice?
- Why does my agent production report double count closings?
- How do I match one agent across two MLS member identifiers?
- Can I combine listings from two MLSs into one database?
Back to real estate, or see how this is priced and scoped.