What You Need to Know about Flat Fee MLS listing

Are you planning to sell your home? Did you know where you list the property influences its sales process?

Well, listing your home on the local multiple listing services increases the chance of making a sale by 80 percent. Why is this an important consideration to make?

If you don’t list your home on MLS, you are at a serious disadvantage. Listing your home on craigslist and for sale by owner’s websites may not sell your property. Reason, very few will see your listing.

Instead, you’ll get lots of calls from real estate agents. These agents will try to convince you to give them your listing. Don’t give it out!

Without an MLS listing service, prepare for an excruciating process.

What’s MLS listing?

MLS is a platform that allows for an easier interaction between buyers, agents and sellers. The agents and brokers acting for the seller place a listing. With this, the agents acting on behalf of the buyer will access all the information about the property. The buyer will consider this information and determine whether they need the house or not.

When selling your home, MLS listing service is by far the most effective marketing strategy. It’s the platform that brings together the real estate agents to either buy or sell the property.

But is it worth to pay huge amounts of cash just to get to MLS listing platform? Definitely not!

You can make use of for sale by owner MLS listing service to list your home on MLS. In this way, you’ll be giving your home tremendous exposure. Besides, the Flat Fee MLS provider will help you avoid paying expensive commissions just because of listing your property with an agent.

But you’ll need to look at the flat fee rate keenly. They’re not all the same out there.

What Do You Need to Know About Flat Fee Rate?

1. You Make Upfront Payment for the Fees

If you choose to sell your property through a real estate agent, you’ll pay commission after the sale. In fact, the amount to pay as the commission will be deducted from your property sales amount. If you list your property with a flat fee service, you’ll make upfront payment before the transaction is done.

However, should you make the upfront payments? Well, it depends on your personality. But making a onetime payment helps you save thousands as commission.

The MLS agent will only charge you a small amount to list your property. You won’t pay anything else thereafter.

However, be very careful. Ensure that your contact information won’t be shared with another brokerage.

2. Will You Get a Full Access to an MLS listing service?

Cheap is always expensive. With the attempt to lure you with lower listing costs, some MLS listing service won’t grant you full access to MLS.

In most cases, there will be a limitation on your listing duration or a caveat on the images you can upload. At times, the contact information will not be shared on your listing.

Remember, when people search for a house, they’ll first check the quality of images in there. If your listing has fewer or low-quality pictures, it’ll attract fewer or no attention at all. Making a sale here may be very challenging.

Also, ensure you are able to list your property for a whole year with no disruptions. Further, your contact details and not that of an agent should be on the listing. In doing this, you’ll be the person in control.

3. Offers and Counter Offers Must Go Through a Real Estate Broker

MLS listing services restrict their access to real estate agents and their brokers. If an agent posts a listing on behalf of their customer, they’ll be doing so with the authority of their broker.

By law, any offer and counter offer you make must pass through a real estate broker. The broker must have the authorization to list any property on MLS. There’s no two way about it. If you don’t follow this, then you’re not compliant with real estate laws.

As such, you need to be sure when engaging for sale by owner MLS listing service that they will forward all offers they receive on your property. The service needs to have a licensed real estate broker to facilitate the negotiations.

Also, seek clarification as to whether they’ll surcharge you for extra costs or not.

4. Not All Flat Fee MLS listing service Will Allow Your Contact Information

A number of real estate agents and brokers consider “For sale by owners” as their easier targets. As such, they’ll accept to list your property on MLS. However, they’ll use their contact details on the listing rather than your contact details.

The main reason for this to gain a position of power, all inquiries, offers and counter-offers will have to go through them.

Their main intent is to force you from for sale by owner MLS listing service to a full listing. In doing this, you’ll have to pay expensive real estate commission at the end of the transaction.

Don’t let this happen. Instead, make sure your contact appears on the listing. In this way, any inquiry or offer on your property will come directly to you. You’ll be able to arrange for property showings, answer all queries and be in control of the entire process.

Be sure to do what is right and what drives a higher sales value for your home.