Hello, and thanks for stopping by.

I’m LaLa Wang, President of MLX.com. I created this website to share our experiences as we tried to create a single, connected real estate marketplace in Manhattan.

In 1994, our vision was an open, inclusive and self-sustaining system where consumers, landlords, and brokers could find each other (even before the internet made it easy!). Although we obtained a real estate broker’s license, we tried to stay out of the transaction and, instead, enable the platform that could make renting, buying and selling more efficient and less costly for all.

Early on, consumers, landlords, and small brokers eagerly embraced our innovative MLX system, which let them list and search apartments 24/7. But along the way, our commitment to empowering consumers caused a stir with some powerful real estate traditionalists who benefited from the status quo by controlling access to real estate listings. Their friends at the New York Department of State (NYDOS) used – or abused – an antiquated law (the Apartment Information Vendor law) to keep us from giving consumers the access that brokers had and from letting them control their own apartment searches.

As NYDOS’s actions against MLX escalated over the years, our plans for a one-stop real estate marketplace were derailed. Ironically, MLX was forced to change or eliminate services for consumers that we could legally provide to real estate brokers.

It became clear that our problems weren’t coming just from real estate special interest groups, but from parts of New York State government itself. For instance, while requiring listing services to obtain the AIV license, state officials, with a wink and a nod, let all licensed AIVs violate all terms of the AIV law. And the more MLX pointed out the fallacies of both the AIV law and state officials’ actions, these officials — Secretary of State Randy Daniels, legal counsel Robert Leslie, Bruce Stuart and Whitney Clark — colluded to selectively enforce the AIV law against MLX.

We realized that if we were ever to accomplish our mission of facilitating an open real estate market, we had to bring scrutiny and accountability to the actions of these government officials.

So here we are. Ten years later – fighting the battle for transparent real estate systems and for holding errant state officials accountable.

If you know New York real estate, you know this is truly a David v. Goliath battle. We hope you’ll join us and 60,000 others in speaking up to New York state officials: sign the petition to let officials know that you want a fair, open real estate marketplace.

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