Listing agent wants to keep off MLS (RE agent, commission, sale)

[aabkowi]

I'm trying to figure out whether a listing should be kept off the MLS. Has anyone had experience with this and would you recommend it or not? Are there agents out there who recommend doing this? Or is it overall just a bad idea? Any advice from people who have kept their home off the MLS (or maybe their agent kept it off and they later found out) would be greatly appreciated.

[Rakin]

In our area, it would be a disaster to not have it in the local MLS. IMO any agent recommending this I would question their motives.

I've seen agents purposely not put a home that is in a hot area in the MLS solely so they can pick up a buyer off the sign and get both sides of the commission. I always look at MLS records on homes with 0 or 1 day on market. Usually It's the same agents and it shows them as the listing and buyers agent. It may be legit but to me it's a red flag.

By holding it out of the MLS, they are not offering your home to the widest market. There may be a buyer out there willing to pay $5k more for the house if they only knew about it.

Unless he's got a great excuse that's not BS, dump him.

[rjrcm]

I also do not see any good reason to keep it off the MLS from a seller's point of view. You want the widest exposure possible to find potential buyers, unless you are really not serious about selling.

[manderly6]

This came up in another thread and if I remember correctly it turned out the agent didn't pay the fee (or whatever it is) to use the MLS.

What reason did the agent give for this?

[aabkowi]

Originally Posted by manderly6

This came up in another thread and if I remember correctly it turned out the agent didn't pay the fee (or whatever it is) to use the MLS.

What reason did the agent give for this?

well, he offered me a lower commission by like a percentage point. he said to see what he could do and after a month, if nothing happened, then it'd be listed on the MLS.

[olecapt]

Don't trust any advice here. The NYC market is utterly different then the ones most of us work in. We are all heavily reliant on the MLS. That is not how it works in NYC.

So listen only to NYC agents or brokers.

I personally know that I don't know enough to advise you and I just sold a place in the Bronx.

[Rakin]

Originally Posted by olecapt

Don't trust any advice here. The NYC market is utterly different then the ones most of us work in. We are all heavily reliant on the MLS. That is not how it works in NYC.

So listen only to NYC agents or brokers.

I personally know that I don't know enough to advise you and I just sold a place in the Bronx.

Great advice, that's why I started out my post ... In this area

NYC is like a whole another world to the rest of us. Different way of life & different rules apply.

[Racelady88]

The first house I sold the agent offered me a greatly reduced commission if we did not list in the MLS. I think we agreed to try for 30 days, and if we did not have a contract to list on day 31. This was part of the listing agreement. The market was hot-hot at the time. The agent put a sign in the yard and fliers in the box. We had 0 showings in 30 days. We ended up putting it in the MLS on day 31 and had a contract within days.

I don't know how life works in NYC, but as a buyer if I can't see your house when I look online I will never know it is out there. I rarely use an agent's site, so I would never see your house.

[manderly6]

Found this which may help explain things a little.

The MLS concept is very familiar to real estate buyers in every part of the U.S., except New York City. Real estate brokers in Manhattan, in particular, have been very slow to adopt the practice of sharing their listings with each other. If you've shopped for an apartment in Manhattan, you've likely had to go from broker to broker to make sure you had information on all the properties on the market that fit your criteria. When you worked with an agent at Corcoran, they would show you the Corcoran listings, but they wouldn't have access to the properties for sale through Prudential Douglas Elliman, much less add a couple of Douglas Elliman properties into the group of properties they were taking you out to see. So you'd have to schlep over to Douglas Elliman, Brown Harris, and on and on, to find out about all the properties.
This isn't to say that listing sharing, also known as "co-brokeing" in the industry, doesn't happen in Manhattan. It certainly does, but until recently it has been on an informal, selective basis between real estate agents. Agents who focus on specific buildings or neighborhoods often share their listings with other agents who also work those buildings or neighborhoods. But you couldn't, say, drop into a Brown Harris office and ask for information, say, on every one bedroom apartment for sale west of Broadway between 72nd and 79th.
The situation in Manhattan is changing. (A good ole recession can do that.) REBNY, the Real Estate Board of NY, has established the "Real Estate Listing Service of NY." A number of the big players had refused to join, but recently (Jan. 2010), Corcoran, the biggest gorilla on the block, announced it would join, and the last big player holdouts will probably follow suit. But while the mechanism for cooperation is coming together, it will likely be quite some time before the spirit of cooperation follows.
The outer boroughs and all of the suburbs do have active multiple listing services, so the situation is different there, although in the outer boroughs broker participation is far from universal.
So this is a very long winded way to say that if you're used to the way things are done in New York City, you haven't experienced the convenience of looking for real estate in an area with a well functioning and cooperative multiple listing system like Sullivan County.

[aabkowi]

thank you all for suggestions!