As you know I find it frustrating that so few Seattle agents put their open house times in the NWMLS.
Thanks to Ardell for pointing out to me that neither Windermere or John L Scott show the open house information from the MLS; they only show their own times. This seems very un-MLSy to me.
We had a user contact us because they were able to find some listings on Windermere but not on Redfin. We dug into it and a recent change in the NWMLS rules is the culprit. Turns out you can only show subject-to-inspection listings if they are your own. Since Windermere is the biggest listing broker here they’ll have a lot of listings on their site that aren’t on everyone else’s.
I think this is a pretty bad user experience since user’s often compare sites and when they find listings on one site but not the other they tend not to trust the site the doesn’t have the most listings.
Redfin users often wonder why Windermere has more photos than Redfin does for many listings. The reason is a combination of things - the NWMLS has a 15 photo limit, Windermere is the largest brokerage in Seattle, Windermere allows their listing agents to upload extra photos.
With the NWMLS leading most MLSes with additional data such as CDOM it’d be great to see the NWMLS support more than 15 photos.
It’d also be great NWMLS members would put their open house times not just on their own site but inputted them into the MLS as well. Given today’s market we all want to do what we can to drive more open house traffic.
Inman News, The Price of Hiding Price:
Listing agents who are members of RE InfoLink can pay $500 for the first instance in withholding sales price, $1,000 for the second instance, $2,000 for the third instance, $4,000 for the fourth instance and $5,000 for the fifth and subsequent instances to withhold price information, according to the policy description, and agents must enter the code “SPWHLD” in the confidential remarks for those property listings.
Find out more in their August 1 compliance update.
Ridiculous! This information will soon be public knowledge when the sale records with the county unless they also go to the effort to have that information hidden.
What the market needs is more transparency, not less.
From the Seattle PI’s Building Seattle Green blog comes news that the NWMLS is Going Green!
Effective immediately, listing agents can use checkboxes for highlighting a home’s green and resource-efficient features. Among the new fields are designations for homes that are certified Built Green, ENERGY STAR and LEED and those with third party verification.
I typically spend all day cursing various MLSes for the hoops we have to jump through (for example, you can’t show $/square foot for MLS PIN listings in Boston.) so it’s always nice to read about MLSes doing something right.
Hopefully other MLSes follow suit so that we can add some green search features to Redfin. This also makes me glad that I bought a Built Green condo. Gives it just a little more edge when it comes time to sell.
Listed Green - the MLS for Green, Sustainable, Energy Efficient Homes and Developments Worldwide.
Sadly, only two listings in Seattle. If I were them I’d hold off charging a listing fee until they got a little more popular.