Tucson MLS Withdraws 3000 Listings
Well, our MLS system made an interesting decision yesterday. Unfortunately, the decision made by the MLS board may impact our clients adversely, and for a while yet to come.
Here’s the short story:
The MLS board decided to enforce the rule that commission amounts should be marked with either a dollar symbol or a percentage symbol. Notice was given at the start of the month to all agents. Upon receiving the notice, our office administrator asked for a clarification of the rule, never received a response, and was never given a deadline to have all listings corrected until about 3 days ago - when they said that all listings would be withdrawn temporarily if the were not in compliance with the rule.
So yesterday, about 3000 listings were withdrawn from the MLS system, in one fell swoop.
That’s about a third of our inventory in the Tucson MLS.
I can argue that notice was given, and that there was plenty of time to bring all listings into compliance, and I can even support having a deadline and consequences for not following the rule. But instead of handing out fines, they decided to withdraw the listings - which can do a lot more harm to our clients than it does to ourselves.
So what about the agent and seller, who priced a home yesterday when some of the Active competing properties were shown as Withdrawn from the market?
What about the home buyer searching the MLS online yesterday?
What about some of the smaller, one-agent brokerages? What if they are out of town and haven’t corrected their listings? What happens to their Sellers?
What about the monthly statistics put out by the board? We’ll have anomalous data for a while yet.
What about all the home buyers that are on auto-prospecting systems, where new listings are emailed out to them? They’ll be emailed with properties, seemingly “new” on the market because of the change in status from Withdrawn to Active, although the houses may have been on the market for a very long time.
So I’m sorry, folks. As an agent and member of the MLS in Tucson, I think a poor decision was made, that could adversely affect my clients. The actions of the MLS board punished not only those agents whose listings weren’t in compliance with the rule, but they impacted you, and me, and potentially a huge portion of the home buyers and sellers out there. Kind of a cluster….fudge.
