A daily house price guessing game, a standup ritual, and a data licensing rabbit hole.
My team at Dialogue Health Technologies stumbled across a game where you guess the sale price of a house from listing photos. It was fun. We played it at standup a few times. The problem was it only had US listings, and guessing the prices of housing in cities outside our own (Toronto & Montréal) didn't feel as relatable.
So I built one. Biddle shows you information about a house (that I manually curate for now): photos, beds, baths, square footage, year built, and a description. Then you get 6 guesses to land on the sale price. Each guess tells you how far off you are.
How far off can you be? Well, the game includes properties that sold for anywhere from $200k to $20M. So I figured a percentage-based hint system would be best. Guessing $1M on a $1.2M house is pretty good, but guessing $400k on a $600k house is not. The hints tell you how far off your guess is as a percentage of the actual price (the boundaries are 5% higher/lower).
Building the game was the easy part.
Canadian real estate listing data is controlled by CREA (Canadian Real Estate Association) and through the MLS system. Access requires being a licensed realtor or going through an approved data vendor. I found Repliers, which seemed like the most developer-friendly option in the Canadian market. They had an API, docs, the whole thing. Then I read the terms.
The restrictions aren't really Repliers' fault - they're passing down CREA and MLS board rules. The short version: you can only use MLS data if you're a licensed real estate professional, or if you're a developer building something exclusively for one. Building an independent product on top of MLS data isn't allowed. There's no hobbyist exception. Their entry plan starts at $199/month and doesn't include real listings anyway - just sandbox data.
From what I can tell Repliers used to be more accessible to independent developers, but the MLS licensing constraints have tightened over time. They seem to have pivoted toward serving real estate brokerages and the vendors hired by them, which makes sense as a business - that's where the money is. As a hobbyist you're just not the customer.
Adding Montreal was part of the original goal. Quebec listings don't run through the national MLS system at all - they're managed by Centris, which is Quebec's own real estate board platform. Centris requires individual brokerage authorization rather than a unified feed. There's no historical sold data, only active listings. Getting anything useful out of it as an independent developer is essentially a dead end.
In the meantime — play Biddle here.