Ethical Homes

A Multiple Listing Service, or MLS, is service run by or on behalf of a group of real estate brokers who have agreed to share their property listings; the brokers each submit the properties that they have contracts to represent (their “listed properties”, or “listings”) to the MLS, which then provides a combined directory of all such listings to all of the member brokers.

If you are buying your home, an MLS is the service that your sales professional will most probably use to search for potential homes for you to purchase; similarly, if you are selling your property, your real estate professional will probably list your home through the MLS. By working from the combined database of an MLS, brokers representing buyers can expose those buyers to a much larger segment of the market than would otherwise be possible; the appeal of an MLS to buyers in turn makes it worth it for brokers representing sellers to put their listings in the MLS in the first place, since that is where the majority of buyers end up looking for properties. In the Metro DC area, Metropolitan Regional Information Systems (MRIS) is the local MLS subscribed to by the vast majority of real estate brokerages.

For many brokers, access to the local MLS has historically been the primary justification for their fees; with the advent of the internet, however, buyers can access most information from their local MLS online without using an agent, and sellers can often find services run by brokers who will insert a FSBO listing into the MLS for a nominal fee. While many brokers (and many local Associations of Realtors, which advocate on behalf of brokers and often run those brokers’ MLS systems) are fighting to stop this loss of control over information, good brokerages have recognized that the access of consumers to information will only continue to grow, and that the only way that those consumers will continue to pay brokers for their services is if those services expand in scope, to include every aspect of the real estate sales process.