Friday, and the frustrations begin. We have decided to use Iggyshouse.com (more on that next post) to list our house. The main reason? A free MLS listing. Just because you are hip and cool and willing to do all the leg work to sell your home yourself doesn’t mean that everyone is. In fact, the vast majority of people buying homes still use real estate agents. Whether using a Realtor is a good or bad thing we will not go into today, but if you want to sell your house and most buyers are using Realtors, then good marketing sense says that you should go where the Realtors are. And the Realtors are on MLS.
Quick history lesson (don’t worry this won’t hurt). Not long ago, the MLS system was coming under scrutiny for uncompetitive practices. Like most businesses when the heat got turned up they tried to see if they could get the problem to go away without actually having to change their very profitable business model. As it ended up, MLS opened up the system to BUYERS by letting member companies provide MLS listings to the public (hello realtor.com and so on). This was a shrewd move, because the heat did go away, and they are laughing all the way to the bank. Why? Because it is still a very closed system when it comes to SELLER access. In other words, there is no way for you, Joe Public to get your home on MLS directly. You have to go through a broker.