Your Favorite Public Sites may be delayed on showing you your dream home

How that affects you and what can you do about it.

Recently, the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) that is for the portion of Los Angeles known as the “Westside” made an announcement that as soon as the agent posts a listing, there will be a 48 hour delay before it is syndicated out to the public real estate websites such as Zillow.com and Trulia.com.  See the announcement below:

What does this mean for you?

Buyers

Looking to hunt for your next home?  That house that you are drooling over may already be a few days old.    So imagine if the listing was posted on the MLS on a Friday.  That means you wouldn’t see the listing until Sunday at the earliest.  If the agent had open houses over the weekend, it could have easily already been shown to someone else, who then put in an offer and got it accepted before you even had a chance to see it.  So what can you do about it?  You have options:

• Go directly to the MLS.  Their website is http://guests.themls.com/ .
• Work with a Realtor® who can send you listings directly.

Sellers

Want to make sure your listing gets full exposure?  You want as many eyes to hit your property as possible and this delay could cause problems.  With 9 out of 10 buyers starting the home searching online, you want to make sure that your real estate agent is doing everything possible to get it in front of well qualified buyers.  This means your agent should be doing one of two things:

1. Have already contacted the MLS Association and informing them to remove the delay for your listings.
2. Have them manually input the information on the public sites.
3. Pay to have your home a “Featured Listing”, providing up to 7x the exposure compared to a non “Featured Listing”.

Because we understand the importance of online exposure, our office does all three just to be overly cautious and to make sure your home gets maximum exposure.

This is something that you need to be aware of. Between this and off market properties (also known as “pocket listings”) the competition is getting fierce for Buyers and you have to get ahead.