Tag: Real Estate Investors

Let’s Hear It for the Multiple Listing Service: The Best Tool for Buyers & Sellers  

We hear a lot about “off-MLS” sales of homes, particularly by investors. Investors love to buy homes off the MLS, but they turn to the MLS to sell the homes they bought. Prospective sellers should read that sentence again, because it says everything you need to know about the value of the MLS: Buyers can pay less if the seller doesn’t put their home on the MLS; and sellers net more money by putting their home on the MLS.

Investors know they would pay “market value” for MLS listings, because that’s what the MLS is — it’s the market! Investors know they’ll be competing with other buyers if the home is on the MLS. That’s why they find the homes they buy by soliciting homeowners who do not have their home on the market.

They make an appealing pitch — no showings, no open houses, and a quick cash closing. Remember, investors are in business to make a profit, and the only way to make a profit is by paying you less than your home is worth by buying it off the MLS, and then selling it on the MLS.

Now, if money doesn’t matter that much to you — for example, you’re the personal representative of an estate, but you’re not a beneficiary — that’s probably an attractive pitch. After all, it’s not your money! But, if it’s your house and your money, just know that you’ll make more money from the sale of your house if you let a professional like one of the agents at Golden Real Estate expose your home to the full market — which is only accomplished by putting the home on the MLS.

I have written in the past about “iBuyers,” such as Open Door, which buy homes off the MLS, then flip them with minimal improvement by listing them on the MLS. You can find columns on that topic dated Jan. 2, 2020, and Aug. 22, 2019, at JimSmithColumns.com, where all these columns are archived. In those columns I point out that the iBuyer companies typically convince homeowners to meet with them by offering a high sight-unseen price, which is thousands above what they finally offer the seller. It’s a bait and switch approach, so beware!

The essence of the MLS is “cooperation and compensation.” Sellers hire a listing agent for a negotiable commission — currently averaging under 6 percent — which is large enough for the listing agent to compensate another MLS member for producing the buyer of that listing.

There’s an understandable misconception that the seller pays both the listing agent and the buyer’s agent and that somehow that’s unfair — that the buyer should pay his or her own agent.

But, although it may look as if the seller is paying both agents — because it is taken from the seller’s proceeds at closing — in fact, as I said above, the listing agent is paying the buyer’s agent out of his or her listing commission.

As shown in the graphic below, the MLS is at the heart of making the real estate market work efficiently to expose listings to the full universe of buyers. No other industry that I can think of works as well as the real estate industry, because no other industry has an MLS.

Last year, the National Association of Realtors introduced the Clear Cooperation Policy to make the MLS system work even better, telling participating Realtors, in effect, that if they want to be a member of the MLS, they must commit to giving fellow members a reasonable opportunity to find and sell their listings.

That policy has yet to achieve its goal because some MLS members find a way around it so they can sell their listings without sharing their commission with other MLS members. Golden Real Estate’s agents, however, are in full compliance.

Are Investors Snapping Up Homes, Squeezing Out Other Buyers?  Yes and No.  

Media reports have created the impression that “Wall Street” interests are dominating the purchase of homes for sale, squeezing out individual buyers and causing the low inventory of homes for sale. That’s not exactly true.

What’s happening is that those purchases are happening through an off-MLS process, with very few on-MLS listings, based on my own observation and experience, being purchased by those large investors.

In fact, I can’t think of even one transaction that involved a large entity purchasing one of Golden Real Estate’s listings. And they certainly did not hire us to buy another brokerage’s listing. All our listings have been purchased either by owner-occupants or by small investors — homeowners themselves, who may have a portfolio of rentable homes or condos.

If you’re a homeowner, you’ve likely received, as Rita and I have, many solicitations to sell your home without putting it on the MLS — a bad idea if you want to get the highest price for your home. Also, brokers like me regularly receive emails and texts asking whether I have a “pre-MLS” listing that they or their client could buy “as is” before it’s put on the MLS. My standard reply to such solicitations is that I would never encourage a seller to sell their home without putting it on the MLS, because that’s a sure way to get less than their home is worth. I consider it my responsibility as their agent to get the highest possible price by exposing their home to the maximum number of buyers. That is not achieved by selling one’s home to an investor without putting it on the MLS.

Media experts and others continue to treat the low active inventory on the MLS as the result of reduced number of homes being entered on the MLS, including by off-MLS sales. In fact, the number of new listings this April was higher than both prior Aprils, but the number of active listings keeps declining because those new listings sell so quickly.

Yes, some of those off-MLS sales might have ended up on the MLS if they had not been solicited, but I think mostly they are homes which the owners had not intended to sell before they got “an offer they couldn’t refuse.”

In researching this topic I found a March 31, 2022, article from The Washington Post which highlighted this very problem of big investors buying up homes and converting them to rentals. Using data from Redfin, it reported on major spikes in such purchases from 2020 to 2021. The Denver market had less such activity than most other major markets, but still the percentage rose from 8.4% in 2020 to 12.4% for 2021.

Above is a chart from The Post’s article, based on the Redfin data. Each of those thin lines represents a different metro area. I inserted a carrot symbol at each end of the line for transactions in the Denver metro area. What’s remarkable is that all but two of the metro areas show a spike in investor purchases in 2021. Those metro areas that didn’t show a spike are New York City and adjoining Nassau & Suffolk Counties.

It’s hard to ignore that the pandemic must have played a role in that abrupt rise in purchases by big investors, defined in that article as entities with 100 or more purchases.

The article confirmed that these transactions typically originated from letters or postcards sent to homeowners offering an off-MLS purchase of their homes “as is.” It also showed that majority non-White suburbs experienced most of this activity, giving the process a racial tinge I didn’t expect to see.

Here’s an excerpt from that March article: “In Charlotte and elsewhere, according to The Post’s analysis, investors have purchased a disproportionate number of homes in neighborhoods where a majority of residents are Black. Last year, 30 percent of home sales in majority Black neighborhoods across the nation were to investors, compared with 12 percent in other ZIP codes.” The article didn’t claim that the letters and postcards targeted such communities, only that most sales occurred there.