An MLS is simply a sharing of information between brokerages. I’ll let you show and sell my listings if you let me show and sell yours. For buyers this is a tremendous boon to the home buying process. Historically, 20 plus years ago brokerages would keep their listings “in house” and exclusive. They would not share and that meant that buyer’s would have to contact each brokerage in a community to find out what was available for sale. Then we moved to manual sharing of listings.
I can remember in the early 90′s pre internet as it is today that each morning my Broker would go to the Town Square and exchange envelopes with all of the other Brokerages. In those envelopes were all of the listings, price changes and sales from the previous day. New listings were manually entered into a black and white Composition Notebook where agents would check on available inventory.
Move forward ten years to 2002 and the National Association of Realtors developed rules for Internet Data Exchange (IDX) which put in place the rules allowing Brokerages to go online with their shared listings. There are rules and restrictions as to what can be displayed, and who can display it. IDX was and is a tremendous tool for broker and agents to place on their websites and more importantly consumers, buyers and sellers can go online and search for properties themselves. They no longer have to ask an agent to send listings. They can choose the agent they want to work with rather than being forced to contact the listing brokerage and use them. Broker brokerage was in it’s infancy then. Buyers could now be represented in a transaction and that is a good thing.
If you are a consumer and you searched “MLS” I would think that what you want to do is search for properties. So here is a link for you to use. This link is to the listings on the “MLS”. You can search without signing up, you can sign up and receive listings in your inbox based on what you are interested in. No hassle, No Spam and privacy is protected.
“A multiple listing service (MLS, also multiple listing system or multiple listings service) is a suite of services that enables real estate brokers to establish contractual offers of compensation (among brokers), facilitates cooperation with other broker participants, accumulates and disseminates information to enable appraisals, and is a facility for the orderly correlation and dissemination of listing information to better serve broker’s clients, customers and the public. A multiple listing service’s database and software is used by real estate brokers in real estate (or aircraft broker[citation needed] in other industries for example), representing sellers under a listing contract to widely share information about properties with other brokers who may represent potential buyers or wish to cooperate with a seller’s broker in finding a buyer for the property or asset. The listing data stored in a multiple listing service’s database is the proprietary information of the broker who has obtained a listing agreement with a property’s seller”
If you are looking for a New Orleans Buyers Agent please contact me, you can use the form below and I will get back to you as soon as is possible but not longer than a couple of hours. Please click New Orleans Property Search to search for properties in the New Orleans area or the surrounding suburbs.
