The King Must Die
categories: Real Estate Industry
Growing up, I listened to a lot of Elton John and one of the songs that sticks in my head is “The King Must Die.” No where is this more true than in real estate: reign on the industry is still held by the Multiple Listing Service. How much longer is that going to last?
Is it blasphamy to say that the MLS will (must) die? If anyone from the MLS reads this blog, will they deactivate my account?
Jim Cronin writes: [Because of blogging] hundreds of thousands of voices can question the leadership, decisions, policies, management and opinions of those above and beside them. These voices can and will be heard whether anonymously, individually or collectively. Accountability is now the highest priority for those that took their power for granted. The NAR can be questioned, MLS’s can be questioned, large brokerages can be questioned, top producers can be questioned, the questioners, questioned.
Read Jim’s entire post that discusses how the power that was once found in controling information is now slipping away to the masses (who now have individual voices online facilitated by blogs). In real estate, that power originally was in the form of those phonebook sized MLS books that the realtor dropped by for you to dogear over a weekend. Now that power is locked up with the useid and password of your realtor’s MLS account.
In Atlanta, we have two competing Multiple Listing Services: the First MLS and the Georgia MLS. The First MLS charges agents on both sides of the transaction a fee of .12% (that’s point one two percent) of the sales price. If you do the math, that is $480 on a $400,00 sale, times two.
Georgia MLS doesn’t charge a transaction fee. Rather it charges a monthly subcription fee of $17 or so per agent.
The FMLS does not have a public web site where non-licensed people can search for homes. The only way to “see” FMLS data is via an agent’s website where they allow you to “search the entire MLS” through an arrangement call broker reciprosity.
Georgia MLS does have a public web site, http://www.atlantamls.com/, which is ok, but it doesn’t show the street addresses, so it has limited usefulness.
But here is the big question: Why do we have “private” websites and systems for house listings when technically it is very easy to create a database and serve webpages to home buyers.
Here is the second big question: Why do realtors continue to tolerate the high fees with FMLS, the dominant mls in metro atlanta?
The answer to both questions, of course, is M-O-N-E-Y. There is a tangled web of payments of fees back to the brokers from FLMS. Agents still want to hang onto web access to house listing as a hook to get leads to their websites (me included!).
Conflict of interest; heads in the sand, inertia, luddites? Name your poison. But I’m not sure it is a huge stretch to imagine a world where home listings are wrestled from the hands of the brokers and entrusted to the “public domain.” The question then becomes how do you monitize it - and even more important to all those licensed real estate professionals is how they monitize their licenses.
