San Antonio MLS – What is it?

By rerockstar • April 9th, 2010

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The San Antonio MLS

Read any real estate blog and you’ll quickly learn that Realtors® love acronyms and abbreviations. One you’ll hear more often than not? MLS. Short for multiple listing service, it’s what agents use to help you find a home in San Antonio (or wherever you may live). Simply put, it’s a giant database of homes for sale that is available to Realtors® in San Antonio.

MLS (or Multiple Listing Service) lists all of the San Antonio homes for sale at any given moment. While it is one of the most complete databases of San Antonio homes for sale, it is by no means a list of every home for sale. Homeowners may opt out of the system and in San Antonio, the broker must be a member of the San Antonio Board of Realtors® (not every real estate agent is a Realtor®). For sale by owners can be listed in the MLS through a brokerage, but they can not do it privately (that’s a complicated enough issue that it deserves its own blog post).

The MLS is one of the Realtors® greatest tools as it provides updated, accurate (as accurate as it is when it was entered) information on the homes in San Antonio. With it, we can set multiple criteria for your home search and have an email of homes that meet your needs in a matter of minutes and have the MLS continue to send you properties as they appear on the market or changes are made (such as a price change). Although I’d love to take credit for sending you a list of properties at 4 AM, it’s just the San Antonio MLS doing it’s job (although I have been known to be up at that hour searching for properties for my clients).

But, I can do all the research online myself…

With the abundance of real estate search sites available to consumers these days, some people think they have no need for the Multiple Listing Service. Although I love the proliferation of technology that has made searching for a home in San Antonio much easier, I have to disagree that the MLS is of no value. The difference is in the data. Many sites such as Trulia, Zillow, and even the search tool right here on this site rely on one of two ways (or both) of getting their listing data. The first is syndication. When I have a new listing, I enter photos, descriptions, and info about the home into a syndication website. It then sends all the data out to the various sites that contain real estate listings. The second way sites get their data is through MLS feeds or IDX (click the link for an excellent explanation of IDX, or Internet Data Exchange). Although these feeds provide data about the homes in San Antonio currently for sale, the data is not always updated quickly (causing you to see a home as an active sale, when in fact it has already been sold) and is not as complete as the data available in the San Antonio MLS.

Don’t be afraid to start your search for a new home online, but be sure to target your search and when it’s time to get a little more serious, contact a local Realtor® and dive into the world of the San Antonio MLS.

photo courtesy of br1dotcom