Some of the articles from Entrepreneur “Open Doors” to Fast Company’s 2004 Innovator Award.
Posted by LaLa on 03 Mar 2006 | Tagged as: Blog, Media
Yesterday, the Foundation for Economic Education, one of the oldest free-market organizations in the United States, ran our commentary The View from Under the Regulator’s Heel of our decade long struggle with New York Department of State.
Posted by LaLa on 22 Mar 2004 | Tagged as: Blog, Media
An Open Letter to Randy A. Daniels, Secretary of State
Op-Eds & Articles Competitive Enterprise Institute
by Braden Cox
March 22, 2004
An Open Letter to Randy A. Daniels, Secretary of State
New York State Department of State
Dear Secretary Daniels:
The undersigned groups, while hailing from various parts of the country, share a common tie to the State of
We write to urge you to:
1. Begin proceedings within the Department that would call for amending or eliminating the Apartment Information Vendor (AIV) law before it claims its next victim; and
Posted by LaLa on 05 Mar 2004 | Tagged as: Blog, Media
December 2003: Going Against The Grain
Fast Company Magazine (www.fastcompany.com)
In most places, real-estate shoppers can access a multiple-listing service. Not in New York, where big brokers keep listings close to the vest. Lala Wang, a New York broker–who’s now a suspended broker–founded MLX.com to bring transparency to the market. Despite sanctions from state regulators, she has kept up the fight, challenging antiquated regulations that curb competition and appealing her case to the U.S. Supreme Court on December 9.
Posted by LaLa on 28 Dec 2003 | Tagged as: Media, New York Lawsuits
By Skip Oliva, Citizens for Voluntary Trade
Lala Wang, founder and CEO of MLX, an online real estate listings service, this week announced her decision to make a final appeal to the United States Supreme Court to resurrect her business of enabling renters, buyers, sellers, landlords, and brokers the access and exchange of property listings, resources, and information on-demand via www.mlx.com.
Wang has spent the last eight years battling New York State regulators over a disputed Apartment Information Vendors (AIV) license required by law for individuals selling apartment rental listings. The AIV statute is an antiquated 1975 law intended to prevent potential fraud in the real estate market, but in its current form, the law penalizes innovative businesses like Wang’s MLX, which offers consumers access to property listings previously available exclusively to brokers.
read more…
Posted by LaLa on 09 Dec 2003 | Tagged as: Blog, Media
December 16, 2003: The People Versus LaLa Wang by Skip Oliva
The Daily Journal of Capitalism (www.capitalismcenter.org)
Business regulation is the bread-and-butter of state government. As fast as individuals can create whole new professions, local regulators can pass a bunch of rules that stunt professional growth. The regulators claim their presence is necessary to protect the “public interest? by “protecting consumers? and “ensuring competition?. In almost any context, however, the stated objectives conflict with the regulators’ real mission—to obtain more power for themselves at the expense of private businessmen.
In 1975, the New York State legislature discovered a problem in the apartment rental market. It seemed a number of unsavory characters were selling customers fraudulent “apartment information? lists. The lists promised information on the location and availability of apartments for rent. In reality, many of the apartments were unavailable or non-existent. Often the people selling the lists did nothing more than copy out-of-date listings from the newspaper classifieds. Accordingly, the state legislature felt the need to act.
The legislature might simply have banned any person from selling fraudulent apartment information. But that would do little for the interests of Albany’s professional regulators. Instead, the legislature decided to judge all persons selling apartment lists—including licensed real estate brokers, people already subject to strict regulatory requirements—guilty of a crime unless they obtained a new professional license. This is a classic regulatory paradigm: No person can be presumed honest without prior government approval. In this case, no person is trustworthy to sell apartment listings unless he or she is a licensed “apartment information vendor?.
read more…
Posted by LaLa on 09 Oct 2003 | Tagged as: Blog, Media
October 2003: Trade Union Courier
Tradeunioncourier.com
Lala Wang, founder and CEO of MLX, an online real estate listings service, this week announced her decision to make a final appeal to the United States Supreme Court to resurrect her business of enabling renters, buyers, sellers, landlords, and brokers the access and exchange of property listings, resources, and information on-demand via www.mlx.com.
Wang has spent the last eight years in a tenacious battle with state regulators over a disputed Apartment Information Vendors (AIV) license required by law of individuals selling apartment rental listings. The AIV statute is an antiquated law passed in 1975 with the original intention of preventing potential fraud in the real estate market, and without consideration for Internet-enabled business models as an alternative to traditional real estate services. In its current form, the law penalizes innovative businesses like Wang’s MLX, which offers consumers access to property listings previously available exclusively to brokers.
Posted by LaLa on 09 Sep 2003 | Tagged as: Blog, Media
September 2003: Open Doors? by Joshua Kurlantzick
Entrepreneur magazine (www.entrepreneur.com)
Entrepreneurs have pushed for deregulation as a way to get a foot in the door of old, entrenched industries. But is cutting through the red tape the solution you’ve been waiting for?
LaLa Wang has fought the law. So far, the law has won. A Harvard Business School graduate, Wang, 40, thought she had a potential breakthrough idea when, in the mid-1990s, she founded Mlx.com, a Web site dedicated to connecting landlords, property owners, real estate brokers and apartment hunters in New York City. With MLX.com, Wang wanted to streamline the real estate market, making it easier for apartment hunters to view many different places, by putting photos online and allowing brokers, owners and landlords to better tailor offerings to potential clients. “I thought we had the model: an open system that would bring everyone together,” Wang says.
read more…
Posted by LaLa on 09 Apr 2003 | Tagged as: Blog, Media
April 21, 2003: WANTED: Regulations that Serve but Don’t Protect by Braden Cox
Competitive Enterprise Institute (www.cei.org)
E-commerce can in theory make economic transactions more efficient and less costly and increase consumer choice. However, in practice, old-style regulations are blocking these changes. This scenario is playing out now in the
Real estate Internet portals can easily connect all the players to a real estate transaction—buyers, sellers, renters, landlords, and brokers. One such site, MLX.com, provides
Posted by LaLa on 09 May 2001 | Tagged as: Blog, Media
May 2001: New Business, Old Rules - Real Estate Listings Service MLX.com Defies New York State Licensing Law by C. J. Hughes
Silicon Alley Reporter
In most large cities, a multiple-listings service (MLS) - a shared electronic database with all the currently available property listings - is the lifeblood of residential brokers. Even rival firms will voluntarily pool information about available homes to match up sellers and buyers more efficiently.
New York City, no surprise, is different. Despite a Herculean attempt over the past year to create an MLS, city brokers continue to horde commission-ripe listings in the country’s most consistently lucrative real-estate market. And while the system may benefit titans like Corcoran and Douglas Elliman, smaller players simply lack the resources to compete.
Enter Web-based listings services, which have attempted to combine the centrally located dynamic accessibility of an MLS with a more open platform. Though these modernized listings services may not have the same clout once predicted, they still rattle the cages of the old offline brokerages because Web listings threaten to remove the broker from the house-hunting process.
One of the more successful plays is MLX.com, a 7-year-old company that offers up to 7,000 aggregated listings to brokers and consumers, and enjoys partnerships with New York Magazine and the New York Observer. Even so, MLX.com has faced a dual struggle convincing people to search for apartments online while fending off numerous attempts by state authorities to shut the service down.
read more…
Posted by LaLa on 10 Mar 1994 | Tagged as: Blog, Media
Upper East Side Resident
March 1-23, 1994 
A revolutionary cost-cutting approach has been introduced here by Principal connections Limited (PCL). PCL eliminates brokerage commissions by custom matching buyers with sellers directly through a computerized database.
“It’s time to break the brokers’ monopoly on the power of technology,? says PCL founder and president, Lan Lan Wang. We don’t need the costly, traditional approach to apartment sales anymore. We have the technology to reduce transaction costs by thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars.?
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