The housing market is prone to remarkable fluctuations, especially in New York City and its surrounding areas. We often hear about buyers’ markets versus sellers’ markets, but those markets can change quickly depending on the availability of housing, the economy, and the demand created by real estate agents.
While the median home price for Long Island (including data from Nassau, Suffolk, and Queens) in January 2019 was $450,000, that median price can change quite rapidly. If the price rises, that’s obviously to your benefit as a seller. However, if it falls, this deprives sellers of potential profit.
This is why it’s crucial for sellers to ensure that their property listings reach as many people as possible. Hence, the rise of MLS listings. Yet, many still don’t understand MLS listings; they don’t understand what they are, how they work, and the benefits they offer. Below, we’re exploring MLS listings as well as the advantages of using a local realtor MLS system.
MLS stands for “multiple listing service.” An MLS system is essentially a suite of services used by real estate brokers to work within a network, of sorts. This is done with contracts and cooperation, allowing real estate brokers to both accumulate more information about different listings and spread that information more efficiently. Therefore, brokers working with different buyers can more efficiently receive information about another broker’s listings that could potentially work for their clients. The brokers can work together, mutually benefiting from the sale while at the same time ensuring that both the buyers and the sellers get what they want.
Without an MLS system, those listing a home for sale are essentially using one channel. They have one real estate agent that is focused on selling their home. While you can sell a home this way, you will likely sell it much more slowly. As such, clients may not be able to reach the price bracket that they would prefer. A local realtor MLS system allows real estate brokers to collaborate in order to get you what you want much more quickly than they would have otherwise.
There are clearly some basic benefits inherent to working with local realtor MLS systems. Another key advantage of this kind of system is that there are hundreds of fields of information about a property within an MLS system. Therefore, your property can show up in more potential searches. In contrast, public real estate websites typically only contain a small subset of property data.
These fields of information are determined and categorized by expert real estate brokers. A local realtor MLS system is especially beneficial because a local realtor will understand what your property needs to emphasize within the system in order to stand out to local buyers.
We briefly touched upon the alternative to an MLS system, which is technically referred to as an exclusive listing. This may be what you’re more familiar with outright, but that doesn’t mean it’s more beneficial to you. Say you choose an MLS listing Long Island realtors regularly utilize. This would mean that within the sea of Long Island real estate listings, your listing would be accessible to a multitude of different brokers.
If your listing is listed exclusively by a single real estate agent, you won’t have an opportunity to make your listing exclusively available to others within the MLS network. You’ll need to spend more money on advertising in order to attract a buyer, which could end up wasting a lot of your time in the end. You could miss out on your ideal buyer without even knowing it.
If you are interested in listing your home within an MLS system, how can you best access it? For most, the easiest way is to work with a real estate agent or broker who belongs to their local MLS system. In this case, the cost of your MLS listing is typically included in the commission earned by the realtor. If you want your listing to reach the maximum audience and sell as quickly as possible, an MLS system should be seriously considered.
