Web content scrapers post a grave threat to the MLS industry. These bad actors can wreck the value and integrity of MLS data.
And often, our security team does not see MLSs implement anything to prevent such scraping.
What Risks Are There In Allowing Web Scrapers for MLSs and Realtor Associations?
Some of the key threats include:
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Intellectual Property Concerns:
- Scrapers can extract property listings, images, and other data without permission from the MLS platform. This unauthorized extraction can lead to data breaches and misuse of property information. These scrapers can sell the data to vendors that want to avoid licensing restrictions and fees charged by MLSs.
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Data Quality and Accuracy:
- Scrapers may not always retrieve data accurately, leading to discrepancies in property information. This can affect the reliability of MLS data and create confusion for real estate professionals and consumers. We previously saw this issue arise in AVM and market update systems that gave erroneous values due to duplicate listings both within a single MLS and when listings were shared across MLSs.
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Competitive Disadvantage:
- Scrapers can be used by competitors to gather information on property listings, pricing strategies, and market trends. In addition, they can use SEO scraping tools to figure out how the MLS is optimizing their site in order to make their site rank higher than the listing source of truth, the MLS.
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Load and Performance Issues:
- Frequent scraping activities can put a strain on the server infrastructure of MLS platforms, leading to performance issues, slow response times, and potential service disruptions for legitimate users. When a single MLS migrated over to the Solid Earth MLS Portal platform, our security system blocked more than 130,000 listing scraping attempts encompassing more than 1 million photo loads, in the first day
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SPAMing Your Members:
- One of the more common, but less covered methods of scraping we've seen across MLS / Association portals and their corresponding IDX vendors is member / brokerage contact information! We've caught everyone from major publicly traded portal companies, to financial firms, to even homebuilders scraping member contact data. Whether it's to call and sell them a service or to track your membership, you don't want that data out there. So make sure you're implementing a system to prevent these issues!
Across our organizations, we believe that listing data is sacred. These scrapers, often operated by unscrupulous individuals and companies hoping to sell your data, use automated tools to extract information from MLS platforms without authorization. And most MLS portal vendors and IDX tools do nothing to block this nefarious traffic! That's not the case with Solid Earth of course!
To mitigate this threat, MLS platforms need to implement robust security measures including bot prevention systems. By addressing this threat, MLS software platforms can ensure the safety and confidentiality of their data, protect the interests of their members, and maintain the trust of the real estate community.