Ten years ago, a seek out real estate would have started in the office of a local real estate agent or by just driving around town. At the agent’s office, you would spend an afternoon flipping through pages of active property listings from the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS). After choosing properties of interest, you would spend weeks touring each property and soon you found the right one. Belize Real Estate Finding market data to help you assess the asking price would take more time and a lot more driving, and you still may not be able to find all the information you needed to get really comfortable with a fair market value.
Today, most property searches start the Internet. An instant keyword search on Google by location will probably get you thousands of results. If you spot a property of interest on a real estate web site, you can typically view photos online and maybe even have a virtual tour. After that you can check other Web sites, such as the local county assessor, to get a concept of the property’s value, see what the current owner paid for the house, check the true estate taxes, get census data, school information, and also have a look at what shops are within walking distance-all without leaving your house!
While the resources online are convenient and helpful, with them properly can be quite a challenge because of the volume of information and the difficulty in verifying its accuracy. During writing, a search of “Denver property” returned 2,670,000 Web sites. Even a neighborhood specific search for real estate can simply return thousands of Sites. With so many resources online how does an investor effectively utilize them without getting bogged down or winding up with incomplete or bad information? Believe it or not, understanding how the business enterprise of real estate works offline makes it easier to understand online real estate information and strategies.
The Business of PROPERTY
Real estate is normally bought and sold either by way of a licensed real estate agent or directly by the dog owner. The vast majority is bought and sold through real estate agents. (We use “agent” and “broker” to make reference to the same professional.) That is due to their real estate knowledge and experience and, at the very least historically, their exclusive usage of a database of active properties on the market. Usage of this database of property listings provided the most efficient way to search for properties.
The MLS (and CIE)
The database of residential, land, and smaller income producing properties (including some commercial properties) is commonly referred to as a mls (MLS). In most cases, only properties listed by member real estate agents can be put into an MLS. The primary reason for an MLS is to enable the member real estate agents to create offers of compensation to other member agents should they find a buyer for a house.
This purposes did not include enabling the direct publishing of the MLS information to the public; times change. Today, most MLS information is directly accessible to the general public over the Internet in lots of different forms.
Commercial property listings are also displayed online but aggregated commercial property information is more elusive. Larger MLSs often operate a commercial information exchange (CIE). A CIE is similar to an MLS but the agents adding the listings to the database aren’t necessary to offer any specific type of compensation to another members. Compensation is negotiated beyond your CIE.
Normally, for-sale-by-owner properties can’t be directly added to an MLS and CIE, which are usually maintained by REALTOR associations. The lack of a managed centralized database can make these properties more difficult to locate. Traditionally, these properties are located by driving around or searching for ads in the neighborhood newspaper’s real estate listings. A far more efficient solution to locate for-sale-by-owner properties would be to search for a for-sale-by-owner Web site in the geographic area.