Hello All,

My dad has recently received his real estate license and (low and behold) he wants me to make him a webpage. But I have a cool idea, and wanted some advice from the pros.

There is a system called MLS (multiple listing service), which is basically a large database of ALL houses/properties for sale. You can go to their site, login, and perform a search based on whatever criteria you choose to find properties. My dad wants to display certain properties for sale on his "new website."

What I would like to do is this: Is there some way to have a JavaScript / Python script / etc login to MLS automatically, perform the search based on the criteria we choose, and save the results? The HTML could them be parsed, and listings could be added to my dads web page...automatically.

So you see my vision now, my dad's site could automatically, say twice a week or so, fetch houses for sale in the area and automatically list them on his site. Any help on how to do this would be greatly appreciated. The site we need to log into is this:

http://www.fmls.com/FMLS/FMLS_CONSUMER/default.cfm

So take a look, and tell me if there is a way to have a script auto log into this page to perform a search.

Thank you for all your help,
Dennis

 

 

 

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Sounds like your first move should be to contact that other site, cos after all, you'll be using their listings & database to display info on your site which unless they give you permission or set you up as an affiliate or something, would be considered breach of copyright. You might find out that they already have procedures in place for just this sort of request to share resources.

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Anything CAN be done

First, you need to know what database MLS is then choose a scripting language that has functions to connect to the database. Then, you will also have to confirm that the username/password you use to log into the site is inded the dame username/password you use to connect to the database.

Having table names and table information would be helpful too, but you can probably get that from function calls to the database.

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Like X said, first make sure they don't mind you taking their content. If they are ok with it, you probably won't get DB access, I'd be very surprise if you got it.

What you probably have to do is grab the results webpage with the parameters you fill in. Say you wanted to get the results for a Google seach (say this happens before the Google API was released), you'd grab the webpage http://www.google.com/search?q=something
and pull out the data you want. You could probably do something similar with the FMLS website.

If you want some info on how to get data from another webpage with PHP, you could try [URL=http://www.google.com/search?q=php get data "another web page"]Google[/URL] (if you don't have PHP, but something else instead I'm sure there are solutions for that as well, just google around).



Ah. I just checked the FMLS website. It looks like they had this seriously lame "protection" against automated grabbing, so I would prepare myself for the worst (ie. no permission).

 

 

 

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