MLS? What RLS?

The New York City press loves to write about our lack of an MLS. In article after article, the reader can learn that there is no formal mechanism for sharing listings in the Manhattan market, and that agents and agencies are motivated by greed in NOT sharing listings so they can keep the entire commission themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth!

What IS true is that our community came late to the idea of sharing information. Long after MLS had become the norm in other urban and suburban communities, we were still like 14th century France, a collection of warring fiefdoms. Until REBNY (The Real Estate Board of New York) organized its Residential Division in the late 1980s, we didn’t talk to each other, much less work together. Gradually over the following decade that changed, and co-brokerage between firms became more the norm. It was not until the new millennium however, that this work became codified and co-brokerage between REBNY members became not only usual, but necessary.

For many years after we began working together, we could choose the firms with whom we wanted to share our listings, and when we wanted to share them. Typically, many of us larger firms shared more reliably with each other than with many of the smaller firms, and it is true that if we thought we could sell a listing in-house we were less inclined to share it. That was particularly true in the late 80s and 90s, when our principal form of listing communication was the fax.  The rise of the Internet brought us all into the 21st century. It did not make real estate agents obsolete, as many had predicted, but it did facilitate our ability to communicate.

Of course, nothing is easy. Our warring fiefdoms could not agree on how to work together, or with whom, or under what circumstances. So we missed the opportunity to design a listing system with a public platform, the hallmark of MLS systems all over the country. We were so fearful of losing control that we LOST control, first to the New York Times, which became the go-to venue for on line listings, and more recently to StreetEasy, which buyers and sellers now depend on for real time information. But even though we did not (until recently) have a strong public portal for showing our listings to the public in a compelling, user friendly way, we did manage to automate and create rules for the sharing of listings with one another. Our data exchange system is called the RLS (REBNY Listing Service).

Today, thanks to the RLS, the vast majority of our deals are co-broked, with one agent representing the buyer and another the seller. For all practical purposes, the RLS functions much like an MLS. All member firms (and in Manhattan almost ALL firms are members) are required to input their listings and share them throughout the system within 24 hours. So a customer working with ANY RLS member has immediate access to every listing in the database, from firms large and small, from Washington Heights to Battery Park. This is clearly much better for the buyer, who can select one agent with whom he or she feels comfortable and not be apprehensive lest the chosen agent not have access to some secret cache of listings. It is also much better for the seller, who can choose an exclusive agent and be confident that within 24 hours pretty much every agent in the city will know about the property.

In recent months, the RLS has also acquired a new public face. REBNY has partnered with NY 1 to create www.ny1residential.com, a public portal with the most up to date information on the listings of most of the major firms. While not everyone is participating yet (yes, our community still can resemble a herd of unruly cats), this site, with completely up-to-date listing information flowing directly from our listing systems, should become the consumer’s best source of local real estate information. So while it may be true, strictly speaking, that Manhattan doesn’t have an MLS, that brings no disadvantage to today’s real estate consumer. The firms all share listings promptly and completely, and as ny1residential.com continues to develop, it will become that Grail so many agents AND consumers have hoped for, a complete, reliable, error free venue for current listing information in our fast-paced market.

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