How do local broker marketplaces like the NJMLS benefit in an open real estate market?
- Posted Dec 9, 2022
“A critical foundation of American homeownership is the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). These independent, local broker marketplaces create highly competitive markets that are friendly to small business while ensuring equitable home ownership opportunities, superior customer service, and greater options for buyers and sellers. Simply put, local broker marketplaces provide sellers access to the largest possible pool of potential buyers while creating the greatest number of housing options for buyers in one, centralized location.”
(Charlie Oppler, Past President of National Association of REALTORS®, https://www.realtrends.com/mlss-advance-small-business-equity-in-homeownership/)
Facilitating a marketplace where listing brokers bring sellers and buyer brokers bring buyers is what the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service (NJMLS) is all about! Along with the other local broker marketplaces in the national real estate model, the NJMLS creates a comprehensive, efficient and accurate local housing market. This gives real estate professionals and consumers equitable access to listings and housing opportunities.
As a result, the MLS model creates a highly competitive market that is also friendly to small businesses and new market entrants—because everyone has access to the same information. Multiple Listing Services ensure market-driven pricing and the greatest visibility and equity for buyers and sellers. Small and new brokerages see the same listings as large brokers, enabling them to fairly compete.
Having housing information concentrated and accessible in one place in local markets levels the playing field among brokerages. It allows smaller brokerages to compete with larger ones. The MLS model provides for unprecedented competition among brokers, including those with different service and pricing models. As a result, consumers benefit from the most accessible and most competitive housing market in the world.
In fact, U.S. local broker marketplaces like the NJMLS have long been viewed as the best option for consumers, as well as in promoting fairness in business competition. By consolidating fees and the overall process, our nation’s model increases efficiency, simplifies the experience, provides greater certainty of success to both buyers and sellers, and provides guidelines that ensure the accuracy of housing inventory.
U.S. Multiple Listing Services do all this at comparable or lower total costs than those in other countries. Buyers get access to the largest database of available homes in any given market and sellers get maximized visibility and buyers for their home—all at competitive pricing in terms of both housing costs and broker compensation.
As Ken Johnson, PhD., Associate Dean at Florida Atlantic University & Editor of the Journal of Housing Research, points out, “The real estate industry is unique in that it’s set up to be competitive because broker compensation is reliant on being successful. The market is telling us that the current compensation model is the most efficient way to be competitive.”