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What is the Multiple Listing Service?
If you are a potential buyer of property and you are currently selling your home, you may have seen regularly the term of MLS. You may wonder what it stands for. In fact, MLS stands for Multiple Listing Service. What is for? Basically, the MLS is a big property warehouses such like a "home depot". Obviously as real estate cannot actually be stored in a warehouse, the MLS only contains information. So the MLS is a database. You will get information about the property but also about the availability of the house too. Indeed, when property is available for sale, it goes in the warehouse, and when it is sold, it gets taken out of the warehouse. Therefore using MLS is an extremely convenient way to know what is available for sale at a given moment. That is why real estate agents developed the MLS.
Before MLS system was not free, because agents had to cover the cost of developing and maintaining the database. You had to pay annuals and membership fees to join local "MLS Associations”. At that time, a real estate agent submitted listings to their local association and the MLS staff gathered the data on what was available for sale and what had been sold. MLS members received on a weekly basis a book that showed all the current listings. But with the Internet, the MLS system was totally overhauled. Starting from 1996, some property information from the MLS was placed on the web. Even information on the web does not contain all the properties available in the MLS you can actually find useful information about real properties in your neighborhood. But there is no national MLS or database. Information you find on the web is compiled from local and regional MLS systems.
MLS are both beneficial to real property sellers and buyers. First, the MLS systems will allow home sellers to create more demand for the property. Indeed being placed in the MLS expands a home seller's sales force and exposes the property to a larger pool of prospective home buyers, and not only local purchasers. The higher the demand, the more pricing power enjoyed by the homeowner and the quicker a home will sell. Second if you are a home seller, MLS is extremely convenient and does not cost a penny to buyers. Besides you get a qualified and experienced guide to help you through the long process of becoming a homeowner.
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