Real estate market information inequity

I’ve written before about information inequity in real estate markets. I read an article in the Globe and Mail that illustrated another case of such inequity: MLS (Multiple Listing Service) boards have lots of information on houses and consumers have very little.

MLS.ca allows for consumers to do basic searches for properties, but is set up to direct interested consumers to Realtors. The Globe and Mail article explained how other web services in Canada have not been allowed to use MLS data, while our neighbors in the USA have multiple house hunting tools online such as Zillow.com and Redfin.com along with MLS.com.

I realize the MLS boards and real estate agents need to make money to exist, but would very much like to see tools like Zillow available for Canadian markets.

PS. I am currently using MLS.ca in my housing search and it works pretty well for my needs in this small market (Saint John). A criticism in the Globe and Mail article was that MLS didn't let users target specific neighbourhoods and yielded too many results; here this doesn't seem like too much of a problem.