a Great Resource for Real Estate Buyers

You often hear the term "MLS" used by real estate agents and on real estate sites. What is it? Well, you can think of the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) as the online “catalog” for all local real estate listings.

Here's how it works: When a new property is listed for sale with a real estate agent, he or she gathers as much information as possible about the property, including photographs of the exterior and special features. Now, the information is loaded into a local database that is available on the internet, usually for all real estate brokers who are members of the MLS system to use and display on their own sites.

How Does it Help You ?

The prospect of finding a new home in a faraway city is daunting and you shudder at the thought of time-consuming and expensive trips across country and days spent looking at homes for sale that may not meet your family’s needs.

Take heart. The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system is there to help. According to the National Association of Realtors, 90 percent of all real estate agencies have a website and offer MLS services to out-of-area buyers over the Internet.

When you provide your real estate agent with your new home preferences, priorities, and parameters, your real estate agent can conduct a MLS search for homes that meet your unique needs and email the targeted property listings to you. View and compare them at your convenience. Narrow your choices and then schedule a trip to view them in person with your MLS real estate agent partner.

Wikipedia Definition

A Multiple Listing Service (MLS) (also Multiple Listing System or Multiple Listings Service) is a group of private databases which allows real estate brokers representing sellers under a listing contract to widely share information about properties with real estate brokers who may represent potential buyers or wish to cooperate with a seller's broker in finding a buyer for the property. There is no single authoritative "MLS", and no universal data format. The many local and private databases--some of which are controlled by single associations of realtors or groupings of associations (which represent all brokers within a given community or geographical area) or by real estate brokers--are collectively referred to as the MLS because of their reciprocal access agreements.

Seen most widely in the US and Canada but spreading to other countries in a variety of forms, the MLS combines the listings of all available properties that are represented by brokers who are both members of that MLS system and of NAR or CREA, (the National Association of Realtors in the US or the Canadian Real Estate Association).

The purpose of the MLS is to enable the efficient distribution of information so that, when a real estate agent is introduced to a potential home buyer, s/he may search the MLS system and retrieve information about all homes for sale in a given area or price range, whether under a listing contract by that agent's brokerage or by all participating brokers.

In North America, the MLS systems are governed by private entities, and the rules are set by those entities with no state or federal oversight, beyond any individual state rules regarding real estate. MLS systems set their own rules for membership, access, and sharing of information, but are subject to nationwide rules laid down by NAR or CREA. An MLS may be owned and operated by a real estate company, a county or regional real estate board of realtors or association of realtors, or by a trade association. Membership of the MLS is generally considered to be essential to the practice of real estate brokerage.