The Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) recently lost a battle in court that forced them to allow their members to download sold statistics. Prior to this decision, members could only access this data through their member login and in a limited capacity. For example, if a real estate agent logged into TREB’s member portal and searched for sold statistics, they would be limited to viewing one hundred sold records at a time with no option to export the data. This limitation forced real estate agents to analyze sold statistics manually and blocked any effort for agents to process and interpret large amounts of data using third party software. In other words, it was anti-innovative and anti-competitive, and that’s ultimately why they lost in court: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/treb-real-estate-sale-prices-1.4795903.
A misconception among realtors
I’ve had conversations with real estate agents about the topic and many of them oppose the decision. Their opinion is that it’s their data and it shouldn’t be made available to everyone. If you’re reading this and you’re one of those realtors, I’m sorry, but you’ve been misinformed. The decision doesn’t make the data available to everyone. It’s still only available to its members and there are strict rules about how they share the information with their clients, just like before. The difference is that realtors are no longer restricted to accessing the data through their member login and in limited amounts. They may now access all the data and process it however they want, wherever they want. This is a win for all realtors, especially those with a technological advantage. If you’re a realtor and you’re not using technology to your advantage, I’d recommend you start. New business is won by innovators, regardless of the industry and real estate is no exception.
How to access TREB data and TREB sold data
Accessing sold data from TREB, or any data for that matter, is perhaps the worst experience I’ve had in my career when it comes to data exchange. If you’re a developer, you’d probably expect that TREB would provide a REST API or maybe even a SOAP API to provide access to its data, right? Wrong. TREB, like many other boards, uses the Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS), which is a poorly engineered system that’s hardly a standard (I’ll save that for another time) and a far cry from a REST API. To access the data, you’ll have to familiarize yourself with how RETS works, acquire or develop a RETS client, and regularly query TREB for updates. Sorry, no webhooks here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Estate_Transaction_Standard.
TREB VOW and IDX
If RETS wasn’t enough to scare you away, this might. TREB, like many other boards, has two distinctions of data agreements: Internet Data Exchange (IDX) and Virtual Office Website (VOW). IDX data is free to share publicly on the internet, while VOW data requires client privilege, meaning that, if you do share it on the internet, it requires registration/login. Sold data falls under the VOW distinction, so if you intend to share it with your clients online, you have to make sure that it’s not available without a login.
To access IDX, VOW and sold data, TREB provides you with five RETS accounts. That’s right, I said five (5) accounts.
Account 1: IDX (Updates)
You will use this account to regularly query TREB for new condo, residential and commercial IDX listings or updates to IDX listings. You won’t receive updates for the status of a listing using this query, however (see below).
Account 2: IDX (Active)
Using this account, you regularly query TREB to retrieve a list of active condo, residential and commercial listings. You then have to compare the active records with your master records and assume that, if one of your master records isn’t in the list of active records, it’s no longer available, but you won’t know why it’s no longer available.
Account 3: VOW (Updates)
The same as IDX Updates, except for VOW listings.
Account 4: VOW (Active)
The same as IDX Active, except for VOW listings.
Account 5: VOW Enhanced (Updates/Active Hybrid)
This is the new account that was provided by TREB in order to fulfill sold data and this is where it gets really confusing. You may use this login to get historical listings for condo and residential only (commercial sold data is not available for some reason), dating back as far as two years, as well as current listings. Using this account, you will receive status updates for listings, in addition to sold data (date, sold price, etc.). Both IDX listings and VOW listings are combined in this query, yet no distinction is made between the two, so you’ll either have to treat everything as VOW to be safe or you’ll need to compare these with data from other accounts to determine what’s actually IDX and what’s VOW. Of course, all sold data is considered VOW, so for IDX listings, you may display all information publicly, except for the sold data.
Full disclosure
If you’re looking to build real estate products that run on TREB data, I wouldn’t recommend you learn the ins and outs of how it works. It’s far too time consuming and finding a tech guy that’s going to have the focus required to make sense of it all is going to be tough. It’ll also take you a really long time to get something to market reliably. Check out this article written by Co-founder Sid DiBenedetto that speaks to some of the challenges in more detail: https://medium.com/@cesidio/platform-architecture-of-repliers-io-6584ce9c7f0e.
Instead, I’d recommend that you connect with me to talk about it (pat@repliers.io). You can also book a meeting with me here. Our team has spent a lot of time navigating TREB and have developed a REST API to simplify it all. Have your tech guy take a look at http://docs.repliers.io.
Here’s a quick video explainer — hope it’s helpful!
