HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
THE OFF-MARKET HOUSING MARKET
SHARE OF OFF-MLS SINGLE FAMI LY HOME SALES IN 2016
MARICOPA COUNTY, ARIZONA (PHOENIX)
24.9%
ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
18.7%
DALLAS COUNTY, TEXAS
14.0%
LOS ANGELES COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
8.1%
Off-market sales are calculated by comparing counts of publicly recorded sales deeds with counts of MLS closed sales in each market. Sources: ATTOM Data Solutions, First Team Real Estate, ARMLS, Texas A&M Real Estate Center.
monopoly and the result would be more competition, lower fees, fewer brokers, and more self-selling. The broker at the center of the real estate transaction would be displaced by the free and fluid flow of information and maybe a few hours of legal time. Gary Brown in a 1995 interview with Frank Cook’s Real Estate Intelligence Report. “There will still be a need for some broker services, but brokers will be out of the matching process and some of the peripheral services. Brokers may be go-betweens and help in negotiations. They may fill out forms.” If such predictions were true we should now see a marketplace filled with broker-less transactions, those selling for-sale-by-owner, so-called FSBOs. In fact, precisely the opposite has happened. Self-sellers are a vanishing species. “The broker is out of a job as he knows it,” said MSN Real Estate Forum Manager
“The MLS is an antiquated tool created by real estate brokers to keep buyers dependent on them. But the Internet changed all that.”
REX REAL ESTATE ON ITS WEBSITE
Sellers have netted $25,000 more on their home sale than they would have if they paid traditional agent fees of 6 percent. Of course, the exact savings depends on the list price of the home. But in all cases, the REX fee is 80 percent less than traditional agent commissions, which usually total 5 to 6 percent. There are no other fees beyond the 2 percent.” Plainly there is public demand for something different. A study by Trulia published this summer found that “44 percent of Americans have a regret about their current home or the process they went through” when choosing it.
“The MLS is an antiquated tool created by real estate brokers to keep buyers dependent on them,” according to REX. “But the Internet changed all that.”
Not Dead Yet The MLS has survived previous declarations of its demise.
When the Internet began to gain far- flung acceptability in the early 1990s it was widely believed that real estate brokers would be an instant casualty. Through MLS systems the brokerage community had a lock on real estate data, the core information needed to market homes. Many believed the Internet was going to end the MLS
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OCTOBER 2017 | ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS
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