Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
MLS is a contract between participating brokers to help sell properties paid for by brokers. It contains private information that Realtors in my MLS must pass a background check and pay to be a part of.
Owners may find public information for free on Realtor.com which feeds from MLS.
Real estate agent is a dead profession, going the way of the milk man. Eventually they will all be showing agents and make as much as a good pizza delivery driver if they are lucky.
The NAR has litigated to the Nth degree to keep MLS's private because it benefits their members. Not the buyers and sellers. That is the bottom line.
They can't hold out forever. The free market is not owned by the NAR.
Easy enough...if you don't see the value in a real estate agent, don't use one. The MLS is theirs, don't like it, create your own database or meet the criteria to join the one that is there. There are ways around using agents, if you don't think they are adequate, create your own. I personally will not buy a house without a real estate agent. My choice. Sell your house without offering incentive for my agent to come, I won't be buying your house because it didn't meet my criteria. To me it is the same as other features I want in a home.
As for selling. I currently have an agent. I am unhappy with her performance. I may change using an agent if I can come up with a better alternative.
If the profession is dead, why do so many people still use them. I would NEVER become a real estate agent. There is no way I would deal with the whining and moaning about selling homes that they have to. Do I understand why everything is the way it is, do. I do question some of the practices, but hey until something better shows up, I find this method as my best option.
I don't have the time or energy to design my own method or database, so in a sense I am paying to use theirs, by way of commission. Sometimes we have to pay for ease and expediency. I mean look what we pay for a car when a pair of shoes is so much cheaper just for the ease to get around.
Easy enough...if you don't see the value in a real estate agent, don't use one. The MLS is theirs, don't like it, create your own database or meet the criteria to join the one that is there. There are ways around using agents, if you don't think they are adequate, create your own. I personally will not buy a house without a real estate agent. My choice. Sell your house without offering incentive for my agent to come, I won't be buying your house because it didn't meet my criteria. To me it is the same as other features I want in a home.
As for selling. I currently have an agent. I am unhappy with her performance. I may change using an agent if I can come up with a better alternative.
If the profession is dead, why do so many people still use them. I would NEVER become a real estate agent. There is no way I would deal with the whining and moaning about selling homes that they have to. Do I understand why everything is the way it is, do. I do question some of the practices, but hey until something better shows up, I find this method as my best option.
I don't have the time or energy to design my own method or database, so in a sense I am paying to use theirs, by way of commission. Sometimes we have to pay for ease and expediency. I mean look what we pay for a car when a pair of shoes is so much cheaper just for the ease to get around.
Real estate agent is a dead profession, going the way of the milk man. Eventually they will all be showing agents and make as much as a good pizza delivery driver if they are lucky.
The NAR has litigated to the Nth degree to keep MLS's private because it benefits their members. Not the buyers and sellers. That is the bottom line.
They can't hold out forever. The free market is not owned by the NAR.
1-Dang, somebody forgot to tell me.
2-The seller doesn't benefit from the home getting sold in your opinion? The buyer doesn't benefit from a database with all the listed homes for sale on it in your opinion?
3-NAR doesn't own the MLS. There are many individually owned MLS by local agencies. Can you provide a me "freer" market than real estate, because off the top of my head I can't come up with one.
The MLS is private because it's a business that is paid for and created by the agents. No agents, no MLS. If you created and paid for something, or if you started a business and built it up with your own work, would you think it was hunky dory for someone else to demand to have it simply because they have a sense of entitlement to your work product?
All markets to be fair should have equal information for the buyer and seller, anything less is just silly, there is no reasonable argument against this. Agents should NOT be in a position to manipulate the information, equal information = 'healthy market', it is better for everyone in the long run. Yes, it does cost someone money so just charge folks for access BUT make sure it is the same access a real-estate would have. I will not borrow 500k for a home until I see real evidence that the price I am about to pay is right and no thanks, using a buying agent, whos compensation increases as his/ her performance decreases, well, that is plan silly too!
1-Dang, somebody forgot to tell me.
2-The seller doesn't benefit from the home getting sold in your opinion? The buyer doesn't benefit from a database with all the listed homes for sale on it in your opinion? 3-NAR doesn't own the MLS. There are many individually owned MLS by local agencies. Can you provide a me "freer" market than real estate, because off the top of my head I can't come up with one.
I always thought that realtor.com was NAR's site... I won't go into how horrible it is because you need to start at the root of the issue and drill down into the individual MLS implementations. In simplest terms, garbage in is garbage out. Frankly, it's worse then the old days of Ma Bell where every little section of the country had their phone service. They need to start with real actual oversight - enforce that the information is entered into the database correctly. Fine, penalize... do it right. I've heard rumours about oversight, but it's simply not there. All you need to do is search and you see it every day. Revamp and expand the database. Modernize it, have a mobile version available. GET OVERSIGHT OVER THE DATA... That has to be the #1 thing to happen. Heck, we're probably dead in the water there already since there's likely very little incentive/appetite for having good data available. Too much "inside info" I guess. Yet, if we magically got past that...
Secondly, I understand the free market aspect of the seller setting the list price, I get that. Yet, appraisals aren't that hard - licensed folks do it on a daily basis. Realtors will give you a CMA - heck, I bet the Agents reading this right now consider themselves good enough to appraise a property for a bank. Kelly has their Blue Book, NAR needs to step up and provide service worthy of that 6%. If you want to market your property on their site, you'll find what a licensed Realtor appraised the home at right below the list price... and it will be continually kept up-to-date within some reasonable timeframe. You'd also see the relevant public record data from the local municipalities. Marketing / Advertising - dump even part of the advertising budget at these local brokerages and create a real site - make realtor.com THE de facto site for shopping US residential properties. People exclusively search the internet for property until you hit some magic number where they pay people to walk through while on the phone with them.
For the rest of us - save us wasting our time walking through properties way overpriced and get accused of lowballing/insulting a seller. Show the real "deals" instead of putting in "won't last long" in the comments. I seriously snort when I read that. Mitigate the emotional aspects from both the buyer and seller when an experienced/licensed/impartial 3rd party tells both of them what they think it's worth to a bank. Because frankly, isn't that all that really matters anyway in the end? If this was available, it would finally bury sites like Trulia and Zillow that people are constantly using to try and value a property. Yet, those values are consistently way off (which probably plays back into the original source of the data ebing so bad). Negotiations will still occur - prices will still have play. Bidding wars will still happen... Probably be lowballers even then. But having the data be accurate and relevant is not impossible with today's technology.
Will it cost a ton of money? Probably... but what is that compared to 6% of every RE transaction. Think about how much money flows through the industry daily. NAR is not providing that much value to your average buyer or seller. I don't know if Redfin will finally be that answer - maybe not... But it and some future another will keep chipping away. If NAR doesn't take RE into the modern times, someone will eventually.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
