API Evangelist Paper · Sector Report
The State of US Real Estate APIs
What forty-five US real estate organizations actually publish, scored — the only industry that successfully mandated a machine-readable contract on itself, and the two points it bought.
About this paper
Every other mandate in this series came from a state. Open Banking in the UK, the Consumer Data Right in Australia, FHIR and the ONC rules in US healthcare — all statutory. Insurance had no mandate in any of four markets. Telecom built a real standard with capital behind it and no obligation at all. US residential real estate is the natural experiment the series was missing: an industry that successfully mandated a machine-readable contract on itself, through NAR Policy Statement 7.90 and the RESO Web API and Data Dictionary.
So it is worth knowing what that bought. RESO-certified organizations average 38.0. Everyone else averages 36.0. All three certified parties in this study are data resellers whose actual contract document — the OData $metadata — returns 401 to anyone without an executed MLS licence. Across the whole market, not one organization publishes a specification for the standard’s own core resources: no mls, no idx, no media, no openhouse, no member. The sector averages 31.2, has no Exemplar and no Strong provider, and is topped by a property-management company that has nothing to do with listings. The portal operated under licence from the body that wrote the mandate scores 7.9.
The full report measures the mandate, maps the access ladder that runs backwards against quality, sets out the two agent-readiness dimensions that nobody in the sector satisfies, and discloses where these scores rest on artifacts API Evangelist derived rather than providers published.
What's inside
- Executive summary — a mandate without a market
- The state of the sector — five hundred MLSs and one standard
- The resource taxonomy — what this industry actually publishes
- The composite Kin Score, and why it is the foundation
- Agent-readiness — a separate score, and a sharper one
- The blueprint
- Standards and artifacts for the agentic turn
- Security, authentication, scopes and compliance
- Provider-by-provider intelligence
- The investable thesis
- Where this is going
- Provenance — what is theirs and what is mine
database Includes the AI data bundle
This report ships with a machine-readable data bundle — the evidence behind every number, packaged to drop straight into the AI tool of your choice. Converse with the research you bought, check any claim against the source data, and take it further than the PDF.
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What you get for $500.00
These papers are experience-based and vendor-neutral, distilled from the API Evangelist research at apievangelist.com. Questions before buying? [email protected].
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