AnyProp, a data processing and compliance startup, is ready for its national debut after two years in Zillow Group co-founder Spencer Rascoff’s 75 & Sunny’s business incubator.
Lawrence Zhou
AnyProp — the brainchild of Rascoff and RH Advisors co-founders Lawrence Zhou and Lee Lin — handles listing aggregation and compliance for multiple listing service (MLS) participant brokerages. The firm keeps its clients in line with all rules and regulations, from licensing requirements to reporting obligations and display rules.
AnyProp is an approved Internet Data Exchange (IDX), Virtual Office Website (VOW) and Broker Back Office (BBO) vendor with every major MLS in the country, and it makes listings available through a normalized nationwide application programming interface (API).
The company also works with proptech firms, investors and renovators, alternative finance platforms, financial institutions and specialty marketplaces, fulfilling their listing data needs.
“We turn what can otherwise become a very complicated combination of data feeds, hosting, licensing and compliance into a much more manageable problem for a brokerage with a relatively small engineering team,” Zhou said in an announcement on Thursday. “Our customers can spend their resources on their core real estate business instead of managing a massive in-house software infrastructure project.”
Zhou, Lin and Rascoff started AnyProp in summer 2024, using their experiences at their former companies — Zillow, RealtyHop and RentHop — as the springboard. In a phone call with Inman, Lin said all three founders had a front-row seat to the hurdles of staying compliant with more than 500 MLSs, each having slightly different rules for everything from coming-soon listings to the appropriate font size for the listing brokerage.
Spencer Rascoff (Zillow / Pacaso), Wil Chockley, Lee Lin (RH Advisors), and Luis Poggi (HouseWhisper) at Blueprint Las Vegas. | Photo Credit: Lee Lin
“Every board of Realtors and every state licensing department has slightly different rules for what you have to put on your website or your mobile app or your service in order to stay compliant,” he said. “Some MLSs say the font size of the listing brokerage has to be no smaller than the rest of the font on the site, right?”
“Or there’s something like you have to have the office name, even though you don’t have to have the actual listing agent’s name,” he continued. “Others say you have to have the MLS logo right in the corner of a photo or right under the photos. There are all sorts of different things. So even though most engineers can handle it, they first have to know all the rules.”
Lee Lin
Lin said that while brokerages’ in-house teams can often handle listing aggregation and compliance on a smaller scale, things can quickly get messy when a brokerage wants to expand to a new city or state, which requires joining additional MLSs.
“It’s our job to make sure that nobody ends up getting fined by the MLS, or worse, getting their listing feed deactivated by the MLS,” he said. “We’ve gone through the vendor approval process. To become an approved vendor, [the MLS] has to audit your system. You have to pass all these tests, and then you have to pay a huge fee because they charge you as if you’re going to sell your service to hundreds of brokers in the area.”
“If you’re a single broker just trying to get listings everywhere, that’s not a very tenable path,” he added.
Although they’re just now leaving beta mode, Lin said his team has been tried and tested by multiple companies, from early-stage brokerages to industry behemoths, like Pacaso. He said Pacaso, which Rascoff co-founded with Dotloop creator Austin Allison in 2020, ran into hurdles with aggregation and compliance because it only needed listings that fit its fractional homeownership model.
“Pacaso was trying to do it not directly through the MLS feeds. I know they tried other vendors to get the listing data, but they’re a brokerage, and they have a special use case. They only need the listings that make for a good fractional ownership site, so they switched over to us.”
“We one by one just switched over all of their feeds to our system, and now we power all of their U.S. MLS listings,” he added. “It took about two months. And we’ve been their vendor for over a year.”
Lin said AnyProp serves clients of all sizes, but noted that brokerages with a multi-state or national presence might find their expertise the most valuable. The company works on a sliding scale, does not require long-term lock-in and simply asks clients to provide a 90-day notice for when they need to remove MLS coverage.
“We let people flexibly increase their plans and decrease their plans,” he said. “Half of our clients start off at some very small plan, like $1,000 per month, and then next thing I know, you blink, and in one year they’re already a huge client, spending much, much more than that.”
The co-founder said his team is fully prepared to reach a larger audience and tackle the challenges that may come as the industry continues to debate over coming-soons, pre-marketing, private listings and the like.
“Some MLSs are okay with showing coming soon listings, but there are definitely some that say, ‘Do not market on the internet yet,’ and they’re tagged in a special way,” he said. “Even though we might gain a lot of clients in the short term, if we were willing to bend the rules, we won’t, and we can’t. There are some people who say MLSs are the enemy, and we’re just going to try to scrape data and provide it via an API, or something like that. But no, we’re about providing the very best source of data.”
