Top 5 Reasons to Leverage MLS Listing Data in Your Brokerage Today
MLS data can make a lot of the systems in a brokerage work more smoothly and can create new ways to serve the needs of your clients while helping your brokerage be more competitive.
I have been working a lot recently with brokers who are finding new ways to provide better service to their agents, sellers and home buyers by integrating their systems with MLS data in new and meaningful ways.
Here are five benefits of integrating your systems with MLS data and how they can help your business be more profitable.
1. More Traffic to Your Website
Today, every MLS is REQUIRED to offer you SOLDs in your IDX feed if you so choose. Why can SOLDs be a benefit? First, they can make your site more competitive with the depth of content offered on third party sites. Second, it can give consumers a reason to engage earlier on your site while they’re in the early research phases of their search. It can also help engage potential sellers looking to see how much their home is worth in today’s market.
2. Improve Professionalism
Today, many of the online transaction management companies out there like Docusign, Form Simplicity, ZipLogix and others have easy ways to populate forms with live MLS data. The data then passes through to all of the documents that will be used in the transaction seamlessly eliminating the need for redundant data entry which inevitably leads to mistakes. A lack of attention to detail is one of the things that consumers complain about most. This is a great way to eliminate that problem.
3. Close Deals Faster
Time is of the essence when an agent secures a listing. By using marketing automation systems like Imprev and others, property flyers and additional marketing materials can be built in real-time using MLS listing information saving hours and even days of turnaround time. These systems help you create a more consistent brand presence, provide better service to your agents and help you start to market your properties much more quickly with a push of a button. Our clients who use these types of systems LOVE them. They have freed up their marketing team to focus on corporate marketing programs, brand enhancements and other more strategic projects.
4. Reduce Staff Time and Cost
Many of the industry-centric accounting packages like Profit Power and Lone Wolf offer options to pull in live MLS data into accounting systems to make it easy to set up listings and simplify commission payments. Again, this type of integration can simplify many of the manual calculations that broker staffs spend countless hours of time on. Do you feel like you have too much work and too little staff? Using integrations with MLS data can make your life a lot easier. Your accounting team can spend more time on helping you evaluate the health of your business and find ways to grow your profitability instead of crunching numbers all day.
5. Reduce Risk
By using consistent information throughout the process of setting up, processing, closing and reporting a transaction, the chances of making a mistake that could put the brokerage at risk are greatly reduced. Why not think about ways to use online automation tools coupled with MLS data to make your life and your staff’s lives a lot easier?
Today, there are so many tasks within a brokerage that can be simplified by leveraging online tools and populating them with MLS information. If you would like to learn more about how to streamline your broker operations, please feel free to contact me at Marilyn@wavgroup.com.
