Open Homes, Open Futures

Real estate technology is still in it's pre Napster era. 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, we've become complacent assuming the status quo is acceptable. I'm not a broker—I'm a person who has spent enough time in real estate technology and architecture to know I am not the only one frustrated 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.

Listing Systems: A new kind of record system. Structured, flexible, social. The transaction record system accessible by design, not exception. TopListings: The front page of real estate—curated, human-moderated, no spam. And beyond: Taste-driven search, social engagement, open data, and Listing.ai. Automated AI publishing tools for independent real estate professionals.

I once asked Dylan Field when to break from convention. He said: "Map the world as it is before you reinvent it.".

Listing Systems starts as a human-scale network: buyer needs, listings, neighborhoods, orgs. It's built for utility—structured data, shared context, tools that we've all grown to become familiar with and come to expect.

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

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.live. 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.