MLS? Why Not?
When I began working as a real estate agent in 1980 there were no exclusive listings and there was no co-broking. Listings were open to everyone, and we all scurried around trying to get them: canvassing, talking to doormen, cold calling. At my first job we divided the city (it was a much smaller city then in terms of property for sale!) into territories and my friend and colleague Kay Brover and I walked West End and Riverside once a week learning what we could – who was moving, who was getting divorced, who had died. It was hard for us, but worse for our customers. They had no way of knowing if we had every listing, or what else might be out there. They had to call many different brokerages to make sure they were covering the market.
Gradually that all changed as our market evolved to look more like what was taking place in the rest of the country: sellers began in the early 90s to give exclusives, and we began to co-broke with our competitors, about whom we knew little and with whom we interacted infrequently. The game changed. The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) created a Residential Division and we began to get to know our competitors. We agreed that we would fax each other our listings. And by the late ‘90s we were searching for a way to do that electronically. Admittedly, by that point the rest of the country was using an MLS and their co-brokerage process was far more sophisticated. But we were New York! We were unique! We did it our way!
Our way evolved from faxing to e-mailing to the REBNY Listing System, or RLS. Although the press still delights in writing about how we don’t have a multiple listing system because greedy New York agents want to keep the whole commission for themselves, in fact we have had a de facto MLS for years. But because our community cannot agree to actually establish an MLS, we all still spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on separate listing systems. Why?
As I have written in this blog before, information is no longer our currency. It’s a commodity available to everyone through the Internet. The broker today is an advisor and provider of expertise, not a gateway to listing data. So we should transmit data between ourselves and to consumers as seamlessly and easily as possible, ideally with a public website attached which would give unfettered access to fully updated, agent provided data on every listing. REBNY has tried to create such a public site with www.residentialNYC.com but it never has enjoyed 100% participation. The new VOW websites require complete consumer registration. Everywhere else in the country brokerages control their own data and enhance the consumer experience by marketing their properties through MLS public sites. We are probably the most elite market in the country, with an extraordinarily skilled and diverse broker population. What are we waiting for?