My blossoming love affair with flexMLS, the new MLS system adopted by the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This

is the F.Q. Story Historic District in Downtown Phoenix as rendered by the flexMLS MLS system recently adopted by the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service. ARMLS is 30,000 Realtors working in the fifth largest city in the U.S. — and the 14th largest market area — so this is a big MLS system by any measure.

This particular map looks a whole lot better on the screen. I had to scale drastically to get it to fit here. Here’s the good news: You can see it for real, live, on a “portal” that I built for this post.

Do this:

Go here.

Your user name is: Jack Swilling

Your password is: demo

Please don’t reset the password, or no one else will be able to get in. For all of me, I would make passwords optional, but that’s only because I hate them with the passionate heat of a thousand suns — no big deal.

I built this search to show off just a little bit of what flexMLS can do. I’m not even a good tour guide on the subject. Cathy has a much richer base of experience than mine. For all the gee whiz technology we talk about around here, I am not an early adopter. The words you are most likely to hear from my mouth, when discussing new technology, are “mission critical,” and I won’t risk a mission critical function on something new until it is completely tested. I’ve been in love with the iPhone for 19 months — and I’m getting mine next week.

But, even so, this software is cool.

In the photo (or in the map view in the portal), you will see that I have defined F.Q. Story as three irregular polygons. Why? Because Realtors can’t spell. In principle, I should be able to use the “Subdivision” field in the MLS listing — but I don’t trust it. If the address is mapped correctly — and flexMLS makes it difficult to map a home improperly — it will show up in a polygon search.

And because I can use multiple non-contiguous irregular polygons to define a search, I can base my search of Story on market realities. How’s that? The priciest properties in Story are in the top-right polygon. People in that part of the Story call the homes in the top left polygon “West Side Story” — this because the homes west of 15th Avenue are smaller, newer, sit on smaller lots and have the I-10 Freeway looming over them. People living west of 15th Avenue don’t like to talk about it, but their homes sell for less money.

The same goes for the polygon south of the freeway. The historic preservation movement in Phoenix got its start when the I-10 plowed through two streets of unique historic homes in Story. The region south of the freeway hasn’t recovered as well as its counterpart due north.

These are economic facts based on a hard-headed knowledge of the inventory. By defining Story as three separate polygons, I can isolate my searches to just the areas I’m interested in. If I have a buyer who wants Story-without-footnotes-or-caveats, I can kill the two lower-priced polygons and isolate my search to only the toniest homes. If I’m listing west of 15th Avenue, I can isolate to that one polygon to compare apples-to-apples.

Just that little bit of flexMLS totally rocks, but you can’t let me play with software without getting a wish list. I wish the polygons went down in different — selectable — colors, to make visual distinction easier. I wish they were nameable. I wish they were editable — without having to delete and redraw and without being stoopid like the editable polygons in Google Maps. I wish they could be turned on and off, instead of just being there or not-there. All that notwithstanding, map-based polygon searching in flexMLS is pretty damn good.

But wait. There’s more. I am a geek by predisposition — a high-D INTJ, a very demanding, very exacting boss. But I am a salesman by profession. And as cool as that map is, it’s just a tree. The forest in flexMLS is that portal. If you didn’t check it out before, do now. What you’re seeing is an amazingly powerful sales tool. The Truzillios have it all over FBS Systems for graphic appeal, but that portal is just an incredible “touch” — in the language of selling.

Like this: I send you the search of your ideal homes. The when we talk on the phone, I encourage you to fire up the portal. I open up my identical version from within flexMLS. Now we can set up our results to display the same houses in the same order and go through them one-by-one. I can tell you about subdivisions, orientation, positive and negative aspects about the local government. I may even have been inside that home in the past. I may have pictures from previous visits. This is an incredibly powerful sales tool. Not only can I work with you to get us down to a really useful short list of homes to look at, just by talking about specific houses I can pull out those previously-unmentioned must-have features or deal-killer objections.

The way the portal is set up, with absolutely everything available on every house, continuously updated as facts change in the MLS system, makes it a hugely valuable tool for working with buyers.

Now stop and think. Let’s comp homes with sellers. Now I’m back to schlepping a laptop, because I will want to be able to set up a comps portal, then go through it house-by-house with sellers. No more stacks of papers and hand-waving speeches. “Please look at the photographs of these recently sold houses and tell my again why your home should sell for $25,000 more?” That’s a show-stopper.

There is CMA software in the flexMLS system that is as good as the stuff appraisers use — and I don’t care. I’m a high-D and I will never comp a house that rigorously. Cathy will, and when we add a high-C for the administrative tasks, I will benefit by those rigorous CMAs. But I am a salesman, and I am here to tell you — here in Phoenix and nationwide — that flexMLS is a killer sales tool.

I’m just growing into the software — mission critical first and always, so I don’t let new things come between me and the tasks that must be accomplished. There are things I haven’t figured out yet, and other things I’m kludging my way through. It’s possible I’ll write more about it in the future. But making this change was a big, gutsy move by ARMLS President Gary Cumiskey. The man is to be commended for his fortitude, but give him credit — he was right. flexMLS is a very useful tool for selling real estate.

 
PS: Colonel Jack Swilling was the founder of Phoenix. He’s been dead since 1880, so I didn’t think he’d mind my borrowing his name. Michael Wurzer of FBS Systems points out that, as a matter of policy, flexMLS portals should not be shared publicly. The F.Q. Story portal shown here is presented for demonstration purposes only.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing, technology