Marin Real Estate – OFF the MLS
The real estate stats lie. If you have spent any time on my site, you know I LOVE real estate stats. I am stats junkie as a matter of fact. They provide a ton of valuable information. Unfortunately, what you can’t see from the currents stats are real listing inventory numbers.
In Marin County, a HUGE number of home are for sale, but are not on the MLS. Tons of homes are coming on the market or are staying on the market, but you won’t find a good chunk of them on whatever search engine you might be using.
Home sellers and agents are afraid of the all important DOM- Days on market. Fearing a high number, they are withholding the listing from the MLS. This skews the stats for both real, accurate days on market numbers and also for market absorption rates.
I believe keeping listings off the MLS is a bad for everyone, even sellers fearful of too many days on the market.
Marin home sellers- listen to me now, most buyers are smart enough to know that the days on market stats aren’t accurate. The tradeoff of being off MLS is that you miss a huge portion of buyers. Suddenly, you rely on agents, many of whom may not know that your home is for sale. What if the home buyer happens to have an agent who isn’t connected? This also assumes active buyers are working with an agent. There are tons, and tons of home buyers doing their initial research on their own. Those buyers are very real, and they aren’t being exposed to your property. As much as high days on market may be undesirable, it is even more undesirable for you to limit your access to home buyers. Staying “off the MLS” is really like being off the market. It just doesn’t make sense if you want to sell your home.
Unfortunately, do-it-yourself home buyers are really only seeing a small portion of true home inventory. If you are a buyer not working with agent, there are a lot more homes available for sale in Marin than show up on the MLS. Contact a qualified (and connected) agent to give you the inside scoop. As much as I dislike off the market listings, the reality is that there are a ton of them out there, and unless you are working with agent “in the know”, you may never see them.
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Tags: Marin MLS, Marin Real Estate
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Bill Lublin
Ginger; What a great point you make. The issue of Days on Market is huge and was the source of a “white paper” prepared by for the Professional Standards Committee at NAR’s meetings in Orlando.
I didn’t realize that the problem was so endemic in your area that sellers would miss using the power of the MLS and some buyers would actually hurt themselves by not realizing that a well informed agent could help them find even those more obscure listings. Your blog is a great public service – hope your consumers realize that -
Ginger Wilcox
Hi Bill. We still have a large number of homes on MLS, but I am definitely see far more homes being marketed as off MLS. While the MLS is not the only marketing avenue for sellers, it is definitely an important one that shouldn’t be missed.
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Aaron Wheeler
I believe that withholding a listing from the MLS has very little to do with hiding the days on market. There are often some very legitimate reasons for keeping a home out of the MLS inventory such as privacy and security concerns. On the other hand, I can envision scenarios in which agents keep properties out of the system to create an “insider’s market” and promote that as a competitive advantage.
Many areas are making it much more difficult to withhold a property from the MLS, and with good reason. We often forget that appraisers access the MLS, too, and they use that data to make decisions about how to value a home. If all of the data is not available, it does not paint an accurate picture of the market. In the Silicon Valley, for example, our MLS requires that the broker/manager sign off on any authorization to exclude. While this cannot stop withholding of data, it can make it a little more difficult.
In this market, it is especially important for home sellers to exposure their home through as many channels as possible. The MLS certainly is an important one, when it is practical to do so.
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Linsey
Fortunately, I don’t see this as a trend in Orange County. It seems like a risky proposition, particularly in a market that is declining like ours, to keep your home from the MLS. As you know, the sooner it is on the MLS and marketed aggressively, the more likely you are to have a sale at the highest price possible.
Love your blog!
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