Serving clients or breaking bylaws? AI shortcuts into the MLS are all the rage

Under direction of their human counterparts and in most cases in opposition to bylaws, hordes of agentic assistants are currently banging on the door of the MLSs to get listing data. They want it to help in buyer search, CMA generation and trend research.Solid Earth CEO Eric Steggman said his company’s security software is currently thwarting up to 1,200 such attempts per day. And the knocks are getting louder. “That’s on a low day,” Steggman said. “Six months ago, that number was less than 10. It has exploded.”Few MLSs allow for such access or even have formal policies governing AI use. Yet, agents and coaches like William Zhang and Brendan Bartic are piling up YouTube views showing followers exactly how to do it, under varying degrees of legality. Zhang is an agent in Austin, Texas and runs a networking group called Real Estate AI Society. His YouTube channel is crowded with Claude content, tips on integrations and building seller assistants. He’s all in.“I started off basically just using Claude, [I’d] open a browser to use the MLS like a human would,” Zhang said. “But obviously that got caught on by my local MLS, and they sent me a warning about it.” What he was warned about wa...