Open Homes, Open Futures

It's 2025 and there's still no universal, accessible API for property data. If you want to build anything, you have to negotiate with dozens of MLS boards, pay thousands, and wade through a patchwork of rules. The industry lives in a guarded castle propped up by one of the largest lobbying machines in the country; why would it want change?

Meanwhile, I'm just someone who loves architecture, design, and technology. I scroll past Craftsman cottages and that John Pawson listing in Telluride I know you have also seen if you are reading this. I'm not a broker—I'm a person who has spent enough time in real estate technology and architecture to be very angry with what is possible with real estate technology today. Home is one of our most basic needs, and I believe opening the data and the platforms will lead to better places than we have today.

A century ago, the MLS was a genuine innovation: it centralized inventory for brokers and buyers and captured price histories and market dynamics. By many measures, the U.S. MLS network is still the most advanced in the world.

But progress calcified into bureaucracy. Access to this locked garden requires expensive licences and annual fees, and it's restricted to licensed professionals. Public data sharing is scarce, interfaces are stuck in 2005, and there's no API for modern apps. Everyone's income depends on preserving the status quo: NAR dues, agent pipelines, Zillow's revenue. Zillow will never be social; FSBO stagnates; fee structures remain non-competitive; you can't even fetch a simple JSON feed. We're trapped in regulatory capture—and it's suffocating.

I'm building this because the world I want doesn't exist. Too many gatekeepers. Too much legacy. I'd rather build something possible than wait another decade.

Listing Systems: A new kind of MLS. Structured, open, social. The full real estate graph accessible by design, not exception. TopListings: The front page of real estate—curated, human-approved, no spam. And beyond: Taste-driven search, social engagement, open data, and Listing.ai. We own the domain. It’s not a copywriter. It’s what you hope it is. More soon.

I once asked Dylan Field when to break from convention. He said: "Map the world as it is before you reinvent it." So that's what we're doing.

Listing Systems starts as a human-scale network: buyer needs, listings, neighborhoods, orgs. It's built for utility—structured data, shared context, tools that actually help people move.

We're not layering on top of the MLS—we're building our own. A listing graph that's our backbone. TopListings.in sits on top as the public surface. The rest—Listing.ai, Ltn.gs, where.cool—will follow.

Some will push back. But the right professionals—those who care about homes and customers, not gatekeeping—will thrive. We're not waiting for permission. We're building the thing.

We're just getting started. We're onboarding our first agencies and agents and releasing our first public tool, TopListings.in. Our database is alive and feeding the ecosystem. We're focusing on a few regions initially—the Quad Cities along the Mississippi and the San Francisco Bay Area. Applications will determine where we expand next; we want to empower communities one region at a time.