MLS of Choice went into effect in July this year. Some in our industry were fearful that MLS of Choice was going to dramatically change the game. They believed that brokers would immediately drop member of their secondary MLS memberships or would move to the lowest price provider in the region.
The truth is that the July deadline came and went without press coverage, drama or controversy.
WAV Group wanted to do a gut check to see if the fears of moving to MLS of Choice played out as some feared it would.
We fielded a short poll to find out what all of you are seeing in your markets.
Here’s what we learned:
While ¾ of respondents believe MLS of Choice is a good thing for brokers and agents, just over ½ believed MLS of Choice is a good thing for MLSs.
Interestingly, there has been little REAL impact on MLSs so far.
Just 4% of the respondents said they have seen a decrease in membership. 2/3 of the respondents said that nothing has changed and some 31% say their membership has actually
increased! Net, net it looks like few have gotten hurt by this policy change.
WAV Group surmises that there has been no dramatic changes to MLS membership distribution because of the following:
- MLSs are not pointing out the policy change to their members and brokers have not focused on it as much as their daily business challenges
- Brokers are comfortable with the MLS relationships they have for the most part and are not willing or interested in making a change or upsetting their agents in any way
- Brokers NEED the data they have access to in every market they currently belong to and do not want to weaken their websites by backing out of a market
It would be interesting to hear from markets with active data sharing in place or significant overlapping market coverage to see if MLS of Choice has a bigger impact there. Maybe we’ll field another survey to see if we can correlate data sharing with the impact of the MLS of Choice policy.
