With Flat Fee MLS, You Can Save and Sell Your Home the Right Way
Flat Fee MLS January 13th, 2008Selling a home can be challenging - whether you’re selling with a real estate agent or you’re selling FSBO on your own. There are always going to be right ways and wrong ways of doing things, and while an agent may be able to give you the tools that you need, it’s not always worth paying 3% of the selling price of your home as a commission to that agent.
As a result, some sellers find themselves in a position where it seems better to try it on their own, even if they don’t sell it “the right way” because they know that they save money by doing it on their own.
Flat fee MLS is a cost-effective way of selling your home the right way.
When you choose to sell with flat fee MLS, you’re able to use the most effective marketing tool for selling your home - the ultiple listing service. When you sell with flat fee MLS, you can find expert tips for staging, showing and selling your home - and have access to professionals who can help you to know that you’re pricing your home correctly and are negotiating a legal contract.
These tools that were previously only available to those who sol with a listing agent shouldn’t be available only to those willing to pay a high price for them: every home seller should be able to save and sell their homes the right way - and with flat fee MLS they can.
January 13th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Hi, I’m a real estate agent in Orlando. Would you mind explaining how the Flat fee MLS listings work for both myself and the consumers out there?
Do you have any concerns over the real estate board trying to control flat fee listings on the MLS?
I’m very interested in hearing more about this.
January 16th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Orlando MLS, thanks for your question. For more information on the definition of flat fee MLS, see the entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_fee_MLS. The U.S. Department of Justice also has put together a website at http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/real_estate/ on fee-for-service real estate services - another description for Flat Fee MLS.
Although there has been limited resistence to the practice by a few MLSs around the country, mainly in the form of prohibiting flat fee MLS provider’s listings from appearing on IDX websites, all but one have now entered into ‘consent decrees’ with the either the DOJ or the Federal Trade Commission to allow member brokers to provide flat fee MLS without discrimination.
IMO, flat fee MLS will gain wide acceptance within the next 1-3 years and after some initial push back from traditional real estate brokers (just as we experienced when ‘buyer agency’ was first introduced to the market). A recent study by NAR showed that MLS entry only listings accounted for about 8% of the market in 2006 up from almost 0% in 2000. That number is likely to go up as home owner’s faced with declining valuations, upward adjusting ARM rates and high LTV’s seek alternatives to the traditional commission based model.