mls

How to Search Homes for Sale Like a Pro

October 2, 2018 by khproperties Leave a Comment

Recently we upgraded the search capabilities on our website and we’ve been busy expanding the use of this new home search. The new search capabilities allow you to search for things in some new ways and gives you many of the same kinds of search capabilities we have at our fingertips in the MLS. One of the easiest features to use is the ability to pull up whole neighborhoods by name. Use the “Subdivision” box and start typing in the name of your favorite neighborhood and the system will suggest neighborhoods based on what you type. We hope you’ll enjoy the new features and we’d love to hear your feedback. Click the button below to start your search.

image courtesy of A R I T R A

Going it Alone: For Sale By Owner

April 22, 2013 by khproperties Leave a Comment

There are some people who will always want to go it alone and sell their home as a for sale by owner. Real estate agents will often argue the pros and cons with anyone thinking about doing things themselves and it is our belief that the cons outweigh the pros (but, we’re real estate agents, so we have to say that). Although the potential for doing it as a for sale by owner (or FSBO as they are called in the industry) has greatly increased since the boom of the internet for real estate by making it easier to be spotted, there is still a key ingredient missing from most for sale by owners properties. Bet you’re thinking it’s “the expertise of an agent”…right? Well, that’s not where I’m going with this one.

The key ingredient? The MLS or Mutiple Listing Service. While it can be argued that the wealth of property sites on the internet make up for this, the MLS is still a treasure trove of information for home buyers.

Ninety-one percent of home buyers who used the Internet to search for a home purchased through a real estate agent, as did 71 percent of non-Internet users, who were more likely to purchase directly from a builder or from an owner they already knew in a private transaction.

As you can see from the quote above (from an analysis of the NAR Survey of Home Buyers and Sellers), 91% of home buyers that used the internet still used a real estate agent. So where did they find the property they eventually bought?

When buyers were asked where they first learned about the home they purchased, 42 percent said the Internet; 34 percent from a real estate agent; 10 percent a yard sign or open house; 6 percent from a friend, neighbor or relative; 5 percent home builders; 2 percent directly from the seller; 1 percent a print or newspaper ad; and less than 1 percent from other sources.

Although more people said they found their home on the internet (42%) than they did from a real estate agent (34%), this number is not something to throw away. Would you want to throw away 1/3 of your potential buyers by not using a real estate agent? Something else to consider – what percentage of the 42% of people that first found their home on the internet were using an agent’s IDX search or found a home that was on a listing syndication website (which are often pushed through thanks to the MLS)? Even if the answer is zero, the 34% is still a large chunk of people to not advertise your property to.

Of course, there are other pitfalls and problems to selling a home on your own, but for now, I’ll leave that argument for another day.

image courtesy of sidewalk flying

What is the San Antonio MLS?

March 18, 2013 by khproperties Leave a Comment

The San Antonio MLS

Read any real estate blog and you’ll quickly learn that Realtors love acronyms and abbreviations. One you’ll hear more often than not? MLS. Short for multiple listing service, it’s what agents use to help you find a home in San Antonio (or wherever you may live). Simply put, it’s a giant database of homes for sale that is available to Realtors in San Antonio.

MLS (or Multiple Listing Service) is a giant list of San Antonio homes for sale at any given moment. While it is one of the most complete databases of San Antonio properties on the market, it is by no means a list of every home for sale. Homeowners may opt out of the system and in San Antonio, the broker must be a member of the San Antonio Board of REALTORS® (not every real estate agent is a Realtor). For sale by owners can be listed in the MLS through a brokerage, but they cannot do it privately (that’s a complicated enough issue that it deserves its own blog post).

The MLS is one of the Realtor’s greatest tools as it provides updated, accurate information on the homes in San Antonio (as accurate as it is when it was entered). With it, we can set multiple criteria for your home search, have an email of homes that meet your needs in a matter of minutes, and have the MLS continue to send you properties as they appear on the market or changes are made (such as a price change). Although we’d love to take credit for sending you a list of properties at 4am, it’s just the San Antonio MLS doing its job (although many agents I know have been known to be up at that hour searching for properties for their clients).

But, I can do all the research online myself…

With the abundance of real estate search sites available to consumers these days, some people think they have no need for the Multiple Listing Service. Although I love the proliferation of technology that has made searching for a home in San Antonio much easier, I have to disagree that the MLS is of no value. The difference is in the data. Many sites such as Trulia, Zillow, and even the search tool right here on this site, rely on one of two ways (or both) of getting their listing data. The first is syndication. New information about listings is pushed out to various sites through data aggregators and appears on thousands of sites at one time. The second way sites get their data is through MLS feeds or IDX (our listings on this site are powered by IDX). Although these feeds provide data about the homes in San Antonio currently for sale, the data is not always updated quickly (causing you to see a home as an active sale, when in fact it has already been sold) and is not as complete as the data available in the San Antonio MLS as many of the aggregators pick and choose what data they share with you on their sites. The IDX we use on this site is updated every fifteen minutes in order to bring you the most up to date information about homes for sale in the MLS.

Don’t be afraid to start your search for a new home online, but be sure to target your search and when it’s time to get a little more serious, contact a local Realtor and dive into the world of the San Antonio MLS.

photo courtesy of br1dotcom

Real estate abbreviations in the MLS

February 13, 2013 by khproperties Leave a Comment

What do all these real estate abbreviations mean?

It used to be that the San Antonio MLS (Multiple Listing Service) was nothing but real estate abbreviations. It was like we were speaking in code constantly. Want to know if the house has smoke alarms? Well then, you need to know that it’s abbreviated as SMKALM. Lucky for us here in San Antonio, when we moved to our new MLS system, it did away with all of the abbreviations for descriptions of property, but a few still remain. These remaining abbreviations are used to identify the status of a property. Since, we often get questions on what they mean, we’ve assembled a quick list to help you out. Hopefully, it will help make sense of it all.

ACT – Active NEW – New

Means there are no accepted offers (contracts) on the home and they are available for purchase. NEW just means it went into the system recently (its our way of finding the latest entries).

AO – Active Option

This means an offer has been made and accepted, making it a contract. In the contract there is a section about the option period. This period of time (the length is negotiable) is typically used by a buyer to get their inspections done. In this period, the buyer may cancel the contract for any reason with no fear of losing their earnest money (the money submitted with an offer as a good faith deposit). If the buyer were to cancel the contract within that period that would lose their “option fee” which is also negotiable. If the buyer does not cancel, that money is credited to them at closing. The reason this exists, is that if you were to do you inspections and find some terrible problems and you and the seller couldn’t come to terms on the repairs or credits or new price based on the inspection, then you have the right to walk away without being penalized (except for the option fee). It allows for a negotiation between the parties on any repairs or discoveries during this period as well as covers for “buyer’s remorse” (the feeling the day after your offer is accepted of “what have I done!?”).

PND – Pending

The option period is over and the sale is moving closer towards a close. The sale is pending. This period can be as short or as long as the buyer and seller agree to. Typically in San Antonio we’re looking at 30 days for most sales, 45 or so for foreclosure, short sale or HUD homes.

BOM – Back On Market

For one reason or another the sale went into AO or PND status and is now back and available. Its the same as ACT or NEW, it just signifies that something happened with the previous transaction (not necessarily an indicator that it was something bad) and it is now for sale again.

PCH – Price change

Exactly what it sounds like. The house’s list price has been changed.

RFR – Active Right of First Refusal

You won’t see this too often, but it typically happens when someone makes an offer when they still have their own house to sell. While the buyer is trying to sell their old house, they usually acquire a “right of first refusal.” If a property were RFR, you could make an offer, but the seller would then have to turn to the buyer with the right of first refusal and say “buy it or not?” That buyer has the first shot at the property, so they would have to make a decision as to whether they wanted the house bad enough to buy it before the old house sold.

EXP – Expired CAN – Canceled WDN – Withdrawn

Used by agents to know when a listing is no longer in another agent’s hands. Expired means just that, the listing agreement between the seller and the agent has expired. Canceled means the seller canceled the listing with the agent. Withdrawn means the agent pulled the listing from the MLS and stopped their agreement with the seller.

RNTD – Rented

Exactly what it says.

SLD – Sold

Closing and funding has occurred and the house now belongs to someone else.

Two others you should know as they appear on every MLS info sheet.

DOM – Days On Market CDOM – Cumulative Days On Market

Days On Market is just that – how many days the property has been listed on the market (for sale). Cumulative Days On Market is a total of all the days the home has been on the market (for instance if 3 different agents each listed the home for 30 days, the CDOM would be 90 days).

photo courtesy of Foxtongue

One photo does not sell a home.

January 23, 2013 by khproperties 1 Comment

Doing the research for a listing appointment.

One day I received a phone call from a woman who wanted to list her home. I listened to her concerns, asked her some questions, and immediately jumped onto our MLS (multiple listing service) to start my research. As I pulled up the listing (it had been previously listed with another agent), I found something that upset me: there was only one photo of the home on the MLS and it was a poorly taken photo at that. The description of the property was about as vanilla as you can get as well and didn’t even take advantage of all the space we’re given as agents to write about the home.

So I finished all my research and went over to the appointment the following day. I approached the building (it was a condominium) and saw exactly where the photo was taken from. I went inside and got the grand tour. Now here’s where I got really upset…this place was gorgeous! It was large, had tons of natural light, new flooring, and was in an excellent community (they have two pools, wonderfully landscaped grounds, and even a little herb garden for everyone’s use). None of this was expressed in that one photo I saw the day before.

We owe it to the buyers and sellers to use tons of photos.

Our local MLS allows each agent to put up to 25 photos in their listings. Twenty five! And this listing had only one photo. Of the front of the building. You couldn’t even tell which door was the unit being listed.

I think what frustrates me the most when I see listings like this, is that it means the agent is not doing everything they can to help this seller get the best offer on their home. We all look at homes on the internet and use that as a great starting point for finding the perfect place. I know I’ve passed by on some simply based on photos (or lack thereof). We are visual creatures and thanks to the internet, video, digital cameras, etc.; we can have instant gratification while looking for houses in our pajamas. If the buyers are out there looking at photos, shouldn’t we as agents want to give them all we can? I certainly think so. It’s in our best interest and more importantly, it’s in our clients best interest.

Want to see other agents’ takes on bad MLS work? Just Google “bad mls photos.”

photo courtesy of nadbasher

Why is My Listing on Your Site? Real Estate and IDX

July 11, 2012 by khproperties 6 Comments

This morning I received an email from a not-so-happy agent from another brokerage. They had found one of their listings on our website and wanted to know how this was possible as they had “not given us permission” nor was it “permitted by SABOR” [SABOR is our local real estate association that owns and operates the MLS]. Of course, I knew why the listing had appeared and knew that neither of these assumptions were true. In fact, the agent had given us permission and it was well within the “MLS Rules and Regulations” of SABOR for us to be showing this property on our website.

Now here’s what bothers me. I’m a nerd, I freely admit that. I tinker and toy with websites and IDX all day long looking for new ways for our company to grow and expand. So yes, I pay attention to these things more than most, but for agents not to understand or be aware of IDX in this day and age is shocking to me. I urge all brokers to sit your agents down and explain it to them, because this is a major component to your business today.

What follows is my response to the agent, edited to remove any reference to their name or their company. Hope you enjoy it (and perhaps those brokers that still haven’t taught their agents about IDX can use it as a teaching aid).

Dear agent, this explains it all.

Hi, my name is Matt and I am the web-nerd for Kimberly Howell Properties. I received your email via our system in reference to your listing at [redacted] informing us that you did not give us permission to post your listing on our site. You also mentioned that SABOR does not approve of it. You found it on our site at the following link: [redacted]

Your property is appearing on our website – www.kimberlyhowell.com – via syndication through IDX (Internet Data Exchange). You may read more about IDX and what opportunities it provides at www.sabor.com/index.php/mls/rules-a-regulations.html (See MLS Rules and Regulations, Page 2, Section 18 – Internet Data Exchange (IDX)). Via IDX, we are able to list and show virtually any property that is listed on the SABOR MLS. Via a contract (provided by SABOR) between us, SABOR, and Diverse Solutions (the company who provides us with our IDX solution), we have the ability and express permission of SABOR to show these listings on our website. SABOR provides the MLS data to Diverse Solutions and they in turn for a fee provide us with the tools to make these listings appear on our website.

There are two main ways for a property to not appear on our website (See MLS Rules and Regulations, Page 2, Section 18.1 – Authorization). One is a blanket refusal of participation in IDX by the broker, which your broker, [redacted], does not have (I know this only because of the amount of properties we have of yours that appear on our site). The other method, is a listing by listing method. This can be done via the MLS during listing data entry. The “Media” tab of the MLS input now contains two drop downs – “Display Listing on Internet” and “Display Address on Internet.” By marking “Display Listing on Internet” as “NO” you would be able to keep your listing off of the internet via IDX (and if I remember correctly all syndication – ie, it won’t appear anywhere). There are also checkboxes for these on the newest version of the Residential Real Estate Listing Agreement Exclusive Right to Sell (TAR-1101, Revision 3-02-12, Page 5, Paragraph 11. Broker’s Authority, Section B). If for some reason you have checked these boxes on your listing, then you will need to speak to SABOR directly about the issue as your data is still being pushed out via IDX.

A quick google search for [redacted] brings back an impressive amount of results (about 1.16 million, although many of these probably can be discounted as there is more than likely more than one [redacted] in the US). You can review the results yourself at: [redacted]

As you can see there are the usual results (the big aggregators – Zillow, Trulia, and REALTOR.com) as well as many small syndicators (movoto.com, homes.com. etc.) and even some brokerages and agent sites (your personalized results will vary but I see [redacted] as one of them). In this case, I’m not even finding us on page one…or the [redacted] site. Because of the dearth of results, I’m going to venture a guess and assume you have not given a refusal to participate via the “Display Listing on Internet” drop down menu in MLS. Of course, this would be the quickest and easiest way to scrub your listing from the internet, although it would still take a few days to really see the effects (SABOR has a minimum requirement of IDX feed updates of every three days – we update a lot more often however).

I hope this helps explain IDX a bit and helps you understand why your property appears on our site. It’s actually a rather common practice and is growing in size every day. We here in San Antonio are a bit behind the curve when it comes to implementing the IDX systems for broker and agent websites if you ask me, but I’m seeing it more and more and I welcome the change. With people using the internet more and more, it makes sense to make properties available on other sites, after all, the goal is to sell the property, and the more people that can view it, the larger the pool of potential buyers.

If there’s anything else I can do to help your understanding of IDX and its uses, please let me know.

I also highly recommend this article by Jay Thomspon (The Phoenix Real Estate Guy) on the subject. Although he is dealing with a different MLS (ARMLS in Arizona), the story is quite the same. Jay is widely regarded by many as the Godfather of Real Estate Blogging and is a highly sought after speaker on the subject (and many others) at many events across the nation.