Tyler Sookochoff ask these questions in a comment to another post, but my reply is long enough that I think it warrants a post of its own.
Marketing of homes aside, do you rely solely on your local MLS to do CMAs and price homes you’re hired to sell? Or could you survive/thrive without the MLS?
Too many questions conflated as one. There are actually three justifications for the MLS: Advertising, the co-broke — and protection of the earned commissions of “procuring” agents. The latter is what is literally meant by “cooperation” — all member agents agree in advance to respect each other’s client relationships, with a dispute-resolution procedure if they don’t.
If the MLS were opened up or replaced, would sellers still want maximum exposure for their properties? Yes, certainly.
Would this entail an offer of broker cooperation/compensation? That depends on whether the buyer’s agent’s compensation continues to come through the seller/listing agent, or whether the RESPA/HUD-1 procedure can be interpreted or revised to permit buyers to finance the buyer’s agent’s compensation as part of the home loan. (This is what is happening now, it’s just being done by sleight of hand through the seller and listing agent.)
Will brokers use whatever price information they have at hand to prepare CMAs? You bet — but not exclusively. Their own on-the-ground knowledge of neighborhoods and the comp listings, plus a first-hand inspection of the subject property are at least as important as any information derived from a database.
So the question is not, will I be stuck working without an MLS (commercial brokers often do, as do land and business brokers)? The question is, what form might a future MLS take?
For what it’s worth, I’m a skeptic on MLS-replacement for now. First, it takes an incredible amount of data to make an MLS listing worthwhile — more work than FSBO sellers might be willing to do, in many cases entailing knowledge they do not have. Second, significant details vary from one locale to another.
Witness: My friend and colleague Richard Riccelli is selling a triplex right now. What’s a triplex? In Boston and New York City, it’s a three-story apartment, condominium or co-op — any one of those three kinds of tenancy/ownership, details unspecified.
Where I grew up in Illinois, a triplex was three domiciles under one roof, each independently owned as a horizontal property regime (condominium plat), with the structure and grounds owned as a tenancy-in-common (I think; I would probably need to be licensed in Illinois to understand this kind of multi-family dwelling).
Here in Arizona, a triplex is a multi-family apartment property, three domiciles under one roof owned in fee simple by one owner/investor, who may or may not reside in one of the units. (We have duplexes, which are like triplexes, but we also have “twin-homes” or “gemini-homes”, which are like a duplexes in Illinois. To keep our brains unbefuddled, we have very few multi-story apartment-style dwellings.)
How many fields in a national database would it take to distinguish just those three (I’ll bet there are other types of triplexes), and how much knowledge of fundamental laws of property do you expect sellers and avidly-searching buyers to have?
Prognostication: A local professional MLS system like the ARMLS system here in Maricopa County is probably pretty safe. Access and syndication rules may change, but it is a real and useful database, not a joke foisted off on an unsuspecting public.
National toy-search systems like Trulia.com or PropSmart.com may do okay as advertising media, but they’re useless to professionals as home search tools.
National MLS-based systems like Realtor.com or realestate.yahoo.com are also essentially crippled, although they at least have a greater quantity of poorly-documented homes.
An hypothesized national professional-quality MLS system may come to exist, but I find this to be an extremely unlikely proposition in the near-term future. Data coordination would be a bear. An outage of any length of time would cause a recession. Eggs. Baskets. Hmm…
A national limited-scope aggregator of results re-syndicated from professional-quality local systems is a more likely possibility. But: Guess who owns those local systems?
The Trulia way of doing things — and the GoogleBase way — turns every listing into an exclusive listing, a giant step backward from the goal of MLS systems. But this problem would be addressed by severing the buyer’s agent’s compensation from the listing’s agent’s compensation.
In other words, the only “procured” client would be the one procured by a signed employment contract. If a represented buyer contacts a listing agent trough a Trulia link, the buyer nevertheless controls the compensation for his representation and pays the agent he is under contract to pay.
In that circumstance, the listing agent will need to decide how to respond, but the doctrine of procuring cause occasioned by the current form of the listing contract goes out the window.
That much I like. For the rest, hide and watch. If the Feds can limit their involvement to policing crimes, the market will take care of itself.
Assuming we don’t get Big Mother rammed down our throats, which will be hugely destructive, what we’re left with is this:
Advertising is a given. It not only will not go away, it will get a lot better, even though it will offer only limited detail.
Cooperation and compensation are easily addressed by other means. The need for dispute-resolution goes away if we can sever the buyer’s agent’s compensation from the listing agent’s fee. That leaves current MLS exclusivity as an anti-consumer cartel — kind of a nose-wide-open position to be in.
What’s left is the quality and quantity of the data in an MLS system, as against any would-be competitors. The more arcane data doesn’t travel as well as we might want it to, but it probably doesn’t need to in any case.
But: It would be a mistake to replace this depth of information with a more-shallow but more-user-friendly substitute. A true home search entails searching for the small details, not the big features.
The irony is, if we burn down the mission, as it were, my value as a professional home scout will go up, not down…
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Technorati Tags: blogging, compensation for buyer representation, disintermediation, real estate marketing
Tyler Sookochoff says:
Thanks for the elaborate reply, Greg! I agree that the MLS’s greatest asset is its quantity of info (Although, the quality is sometimes debatable). This is an invaluable resource for agents, and cannot (should not?) be easily replaced. However, as I tried to address in a previous post of my own, while the public may benefit indirectly from agents having access to this info, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the public (and agents themselves) find the MLS to be the grand marketing/advertising tool that it is often made out to be (Note: I’m not suggesting that YOU say the MLS is a ‘grand marketing tool’, I’m just reiterating a point I made previously).
BTW, pretty impressive that Nadel contacted you directly. Keep fightin’ the good fight!
October 16, 2006 — 10:50 am
Greg Swann says:
I agree with you. I wrote last week about home searches that have little or nothing to do with the MLS.
There is this: when all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.
But: When you get really, really good at using your hammer, you can pound out good results with just about anything. The MLS is a wonderful answer to many. many questions you may never have thought to ask.
I thought this bit was funny. If you’re a working Realtor and you don’t have a”fixer” bot, turn in your propeller beanie at once!
Here’s a real challenge though, at least in Phoenix: Write a bot that reliably produces listings for home that are truly tenant-occupied.
October 16, 2006 — 8:13 pm