Southern California Regional MLS Coming This Year – It’s About Time

Well it looks like all Southern California Real Estate Agents to advertise their listings from San Diego to Ventura without having to belong to Multiple MLSs.

Yorba Linda real estate agent Jeff Nadel had to turn down a $1 million home listing in Oceanside once and later lost business in nearby Chino Hills ? all because he does business on the wrong side of a “multiple listing service” boundary.

“The fragmentation drives me crazy,” said Nadel, an agent with Seven Gables Real Estate. “It’s very inefficient.”

It looks as Jeff will get his wish and make his job easier and give his listings access to more eyeballs.

The new system is called California Real Estate Technology Services and will join LA, Orange, San Berdanido, Riverside counties into one easily accesible system. Also in the works is adding San Diego County, Palm Springs, and Victorville.

From my standpoint this is a great idea. I think its completely retarded that the MLS system is so disconnected and I think this new system will REALLY put a fire under the regional MLSs causing to either sink into oblivion or SOAR with CARETS.

What do you think?

(h/t to OC Register -> article )

Disclosure – Jeff Nadel of Seven Gables Real Estate is a customer of Your Local Tech and Future of Real Estate Technology 

Loren Nason
Technology Coach

5 Comments

  1. Joe Virnig on March 18, 2008 at 7:33 pm

    Loren,

    Ventura County won’t be in the mix for now. Three MLSs did regionalize here last year but it seems unlikely they will join CARETS anytime soon. For some of the participants the creation of the Ventura County Regional Datashare-VCRDS was to put off any type of larger merger with MLSs to the south off as long as possible.

    Joe Virnig
    RE/MAX Gold Coast Realtors
    (805)644-5005

  2. Linda Davis on March 21, 2008 at 7:31 pm

    Connecticut has a state wide MLS. It took a few years to get there and people needed to put their egos aside. It was a big win for the membership.

  3. Tyler Wood on March 31, 2008 at 9:38 pm

    Overall, I think it is a positive, especially for the consumers.

    There is a downside though. I do not think agent should sell out of their area of expertise.

    Expertise is what all real estate agents should bring to the table. Just because you have access to an area know does not make you and expert and you really have no business selling in an area you do not understand. That does not help the consumer.

    I know most agents would agree with this but very little would actually practice this. Selling from Oceanside to Chino Hills makes no sense to me.

  4. Ty Bradley on April 14, 2008 at 5:44 pm

    This is a common sense and long overdue proposition. It is a huge headache when, on those few occasions you need to provide information to a client on listings outside your home MLS area, you have to either scour websites as any non-realtor could do, or pay the MLS Participant fee through one of the A.R.’s tied to that particular MLS.

    Up to now, paying the participant fee for MLS services that are not part of MLS Alliance has been a matter of “cost of doing business” as far as I am concerned, but it does strike me as nonsensical from any but a paranoid protectionist perspective.

    I can understand some concern for historically smaller, more isolated associations that L.A. based big money sharks are going to come in and use their larger resources to come in and poach listings and buyers in some of the exclusive areas of places like Ventura. But at the end of the day, a good realtor/broker builds and maintains a viable book of business on the merits of his/her own expertise, professionalism and trustworthiness…without respect to what anyone else out there may or may not be doing to compete in the same marketplace.

    As for regional limitations on expertise, the idea that one has to live in close proximity to listings one services is not a defensible a priori assumption in my estimation. There is nothing to prevent the exceptionally committed realtor from more than sufficiently educating him/herself about any or all communities where he/she is duly licensed to provide agency in a real property transaction. This is certainly achievable to the extent that he/she can be said to have faithfully upheld all responsibilities to his/her client (fiduciary or otherwise) irrespective of the distance from his/her customary business activities.

    None but an unsavory realtor is going to enter an agency relationship with a client when he/she knows that the client’s interests would be better served by going elsewhere. And those kind of dodgy realtors exist and are going to do their thing irrespective of whether or not there are restrictions on MLS accessibility that the vast majority of upstanding realtors in the Southern California simply find overly burdensome.

  5. Portland Condo Auctions on November 4, 2009 at 3:26 pm

    Sounds like a great idea. We dont have too bad of a situation up here i n Oregon as our MLS covers a very large area. Though there is the quirk that the city of Salem is an island MLS on it’s own.

    -Tyler

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