The Multiple Listing Service for Real Estate Auctions

Introduction:

Dave: Hello and Happy May! Welcome to State Listings Inc the home of MyStateMLS. My name is Dave and today we are talking about the MLS for auctioneers. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of auctioneers across the entire country and many of them specialize in putting homes up on the auction block to be auctioned as opposed to a traditional sale, so if you're joining us today chances are likely that you are an auctioneer.

Question and Answer:

Dave: So I want to ask you the question, how do you advertise your real estate auctions? Where are you posting them? How are you getting the exposure that you're looking for on your listings? Are you doing traditional print ads? Are you doing just signs? Are you posting on social media? Are you using an MLS?  

Dave: Let me know how you're going out and sharing your listings and getting that exposure that you're looking for on those auctions. It looks like Albert Bernie he does a little bit of everything, he does facebook ads, websites signs, local papers. Brad Stecker uses primarily social media to target audiences, so it looks like a lot of people are using the internet of course because everything's on the internet now, that's the beauty of it, it's everything at our fingertips, looks like I said everyone using the internet to get their listings out there, but there are more ways than just traditional Facebook ads or your local paper to advertise your real estate listings and we know it's all about exposure, exposure, exposure. As an auctioneer, it's important for you to get your listings in front of as many potential buyers as possible, but if you can utilize an MLS, not only is it going to help you get your listings in front of other members within the MLS, it's also going to help you get your listings in front of those buyers that are looking for their next home.

Dave: So that brings me to my next question, do you add your real estate auctions to your local MLS?

Dave: Let me know, yes you do, no you don't, or no because auction listings are not allowed. So if you can go ahead click on your screen there and let me know if you add your real estate listings to your local MLS. So let's go ahead and share those results and as you can see only a small percentage of you actually go ahead and put your listings into your local MLS less than a quarter of you and in fact I'm taking a look at that questions tab and it looks like Kathy Johnson clicks yes because she uses MyStateMLS, so since she uses MyStateMLS already she knows that as an auctioneer, she can put her real estate auction listings directly into our platform, meanwhile eighty percent of you say no, you do not put your listings into your local MLS or auction listings are not allowed and that's a lot of people who are not getting exposure on their listings. Going back to Albert, he says most of her auctions are not within their local MLS boundaries and that's a problem that we see with a lot of MLS's, is if you list a property outside of your MLS coverage area, MLS's have somewhat of an invisible dog fence and what we mean by that is you know what they are they're in the front yard, dogs do not go past that line because they're going to get shocked in the neck, but with real estate, there's no shocking, thankfully no one's getting shocked but you cannot list properties outside of your local MLS coverage area because the system wasn't set up for that. It looks like other people joining us today say that they're not a member of their local MLS but they'd like to be able to sell their properties across the state, so this is where MyStateMLS can help.

Dave: So for those that do not use an MLS. Why do auctioneers need one?

Dave: If you don't know already an MLS or a multiple listing service, it's the main way that real estate brokers and agents share and post their listings. This gives a platform for those brokers and agents to see one another's listings, but additionally, an MLS is going to allow those professionals to syndicate or send their listings to different sites where buyers are going to search for homes and we mean by syndication sites, those are sites like zillow, trulia, realtor.com, those sites that you know buyers are going to those sites that we see commercials for on tv, that's where you want to get your real estate auctions, but as we've seen by our poll and from our questions section, not every MLS allows auction listings to be posted in their system, whether the auctioneer has properties that are outside of their MLS boundaries or the MLS doesn't have the necessary fields to take auction listings or they just say they're not allowed at all. So auctioneers need an MLS that allows them to put in their listings and take advantage of that listing syndication to give their listings the most exposure and this is where MyStateMLS comes in, again if you haven't seen us before, MyStateMLS is a nationwide MLS that covers all 50 states and not only do we just have traditional real estate listings, but we also cater to those niche markets such as, mobile and modular home communities and of course real estate auctions and through our enhanced listing syndication, MyStateMLS is going to help those auctioneers send their auction listings to all of those different syndication sites across the country and around the world. So just a moment ago I said we have those necessary fields for auctioneers to put in their auction listings and that's because MyStateMLS uses proprietary software, everything that we use on our system pretty much has been designed in-house and because of that we are able to go ahead and create those custom fields specific to real estate auctions to make sure that the homes that you're putting up on the auction block are being properly represented and again another key aspect to an MLS is being able to offer members that listing syndication and giving them exposure on their listings to different sites across the country. So with MyStateMLS we've been helping auctioneers get their listings on those popular sites for years, because again like we said we knew that there was essentially a community of auctioneers who weren't being properly represented by their local MLS's, they were often ignored, they weren't allowed to use the platform and we knew that, we understood that, so we've designed our system to be able to accept auction listings and have the necessary flags to make sure that they're marked properly when they go to those third-party sites and what kind of sites are we talking about?

Dave:  Well when you put a listing into MyStateMLS each time you put one of those auctions into the system you get full control as to what sites your listing is going to be displayed on as I mentioned before we have realtor.com, zillow, trulia homes, home finder, we also syndicate to list hub, which sends out to about another six or seven dozen sites across the country, then we also do international syndication, sending out to dozens of sites around the world. So what I want to do now is I just want to take a look at some of the listings already in MyStateMLS and show you exactly how they've been syndicated out to different sites across the entire country. So what i've done is, I've gone ahead and I've pulled up two different listings and I just did this real quick this morning just to kind of use this as an example, here's one at 2202 constitution in Enid, Oklahoma at the top of the listing right here, we can see that it is marked as an auction listing and instead of having an actual price, what we do is we make sure that listings have an estimated value, that's because every auction is different, you've got reserve listings, you've got absolute auctions and all of these are handled differently, but we want to do is we want to make sure that you use an estimated value, so that way when potential home buyers are doing their searches online, they're looking for something more in their price range, then of course we do have our members put in, when they put a listing in, that they put in that marketing text that it is a public auction, this person did it perfectly right saying the price listed above is a low estimated value of what the property could sell for, a high estimated price would be 230 and this is what every auctioneer should do when they put their listing into an MLS, because again when you put a listing into a platform like this and you want to have it syndicated out to third-party sites, it can get a little difficult, because if you only put something like a dollar or a hundred dollars, what can happen is those third-party sites will see that they'll say well why is this home listed for a hundred dollars when the other homes in the neighborhood recently sold for two hundred thousand, when they see those kind of price discrepancies, what could happen is they may not display your listing at all.

Dave: So we always, on the side of caution, urge people to put in the estimated value, that way it's properly displayed on those third-party sites, and this property also has a little video tour on it, very cool. So again if you've got virtual tours and video tours of your listings, you're going to be able to have those added directly to each one of your listings, really cool that they've got this one here. So now that we're looking at this listing as it appears on MyStateMLS, let's go ahead and see how it looks on some of the other sites that we syndicate. So I've pulled up the same exact listing here on realtor.com, so again we can see that estimated value, we've got the address, we've got our property details, again just as they enter them in as onto MyStateMLS, including that note saying this is an estimated value, this is a public auction, we can go to Zillow, we can see again the price of the property that estimated value, we've got the address and Zillow being very nice for us they've got that auction flag here for us letting us know that this is an auction property, the same thing on Trulia as well, we can see that it's labeled as an auction and again the same property as it appears on homes.com. I wanted to pull up another listing here on MyStateMLS this one in Louisiana, again another property marked as an auction and we can see as opposed to having that video tour, they're using that virtual tour field to send buyers right back to the company website, where people are going to be able to skip more information and place that bid right here on their website and that's a very useful tool because that virtual tour link that we have within MyStateMLS is also what gets syndicated out to those third-party sites. So let's go ahead look at this listing on realtor.com, we can see it's marked again for sale, it's marked as an auction here and they've got that virtual tour link here and because the agent that put this in onto MyStateMLS they use that virtual tour link to send buyers right to their website, so here we go, we can see how to place the bid on this property, because that link right there on realtor.com, we can go to Zillow again, that same listing the estimated value, our auction flag, if we scroll down to the bottom, let's see if we can find it here, we've got that virtual tour link here on Zillow as well and just like we saw before it takes us right back to that site as entered in by the listing agent and I also pulled it up on Trulia as well, just as we saw before, labeled as an auction, all the photos as they were added by the listing agent, as well as all that marketing text as well.

Dave: So before we go into MyStateMLS, let's just take a look at the year that was 2020 within MyStateMLS and how it helped auctioneers across the country, we can start by saying that 2020 was not a typical year, but auctioneers were still able to use MyStateMLS to advertise their real estate auctions. In 2020, we had just under 2400 auction listings added to MyStateMLS, again because of all the moratoriums put into place last year due to covid, there weren't as many auctions put into place because again there weren't as many foreclosures, not as many bank-owned auctions, but as I said auctioneers were still putting their listings in and we did see about 2400 listings in MyStateMLS, of the listings added to MyStateMLS, put on the auction block, we saw 161 million dollars in inventory sold in MyStateMLS last year. So we can see that MyStateMLS is certainly helping those auctioneers get their listings out, getting them seen by the public and making sure they're getting the best price possible. So let's just jump back in and go into MyStateMLS, just to kind of see what it takes to put a listing into the platform. So if you haven't joined already and you want to become a member of MyStateMLS. all you have to do is go ahead and visit us at mystatemls.com, just click on the sign-up button right at the center of the page, that's going to take you right through the platform to get your account started and created, everything is done digitally, so you can pretty much have your account up and running within the same day.

Dave: Once you've logged into your account, all you have to do is go ahead and click on the add new listing button on the left side of the screen or you can also do it from the listings drop down and click on add a new listing. We'll give you a couple of different ways on how you can create a listing, whether you are copying a previous listing that you had already put into the platform or searching the public tax records to make it a little bit easier to bring in information for the listing or for the sake of today's demonstration, we're just going to go ahead and click on blank listing, as I mentioned before what's great about MyStateMLS as we were built upon proprietary software, which allows us to go ahead and make necessary changes to the system based on real estate law changes or recommendations from other members or suggestions from our members if a member brings up a good idea that we think would also be beneficial to everyone else, we'll go ahead and we'll implement it into the platform. So let's go ahead and take a look at the listing. Right now if we go ahead and we are trying to list a home, if I just click for sale, you're going to see we're going to have a listing price here, but if I went ahead and clicked on auction, listing price disappears and now we have all of these different fields as they pertain to real estate auctions, whether or not this is an absolute auction or an online auction, we can select all of those and again because we are dealing with an auction instead of having a list price or the reserve price, we recommend that members put in the estimated value of the property, so that way it can be properly syndicated and getting the most views by those potential buyers searching online. So those familiar with an MLS platform, this is the part of the listing where we go ahead and put in all the information about the property, some MLS's have the listing form in one long sheet, where you have to fill out all the information at once, what makes MyStateMLS a little bit different is we actually break it down into a bunch of smaller steps, so that way every time that you go to the next step, your listing is going to be saved as a draft. So as we go through the process, we're going to be able to add all the information about the property, I'm just going to put in tomorrow as the expiration date and you'll see we've got some fields in red, some fields in black, anything that's red is a required field anything in black is optional, but of course we're going to want this to be as complete as possible. Earlier in the webinar, we saw all the different syndication options that we do offer within MyStateMLS, I've got them defaulted turn on for my account, we can turn any of them on and off on a per listing basis, so if you've got a homeowner that doesn't want their listing seen on certain sites for one reason or another, we can go through and we can turn those off at any time, again because we are in MLS, one of the key aspects of an MLS is that members co-broke and cooperate with one another and what we mean by that is when you put a listing into the platform you do need to offer some sort of compensation to other members, if they're to bring that successful bidder, buyer to your property, we cannot tell you how much it has to be, we don't set a minimum requirement, we do require that it's either a dollar amount or a percentage and that's entirely up to you and the homeowner when you put that property up on the auction block. 

Dave: So maybe I'm just going to do a flat fee, so I would do that here, I'm going to put in the phone number and name of the homeowner and we're just going to go through the listing, and as you can see adding a listing incredibly easy because again we make you go through step by step making it as easy as possible. After we've put in basic information about the property, we go on and we're going to talk about the interior features, this will talk about the bedrooms or excuse me, the type of rooms that are in the home, the flooring, the heat type, the cooling type, is there a fireplace, after we've done the inside of the house, we move on to the outside, that's where we're going to talk about our siding type, our roof type, is there a pool, is there room for a pool, what other exterior amenities are there, again anything that we set or do not set now, nothing is set in stone, if we ever need to go back, we can go back and finish it at any time and we can just continue to go through the listing process step by step, again as we said when you put a auction listing in, you should put in the estimated value, in the public unbranded marketing text, we should also include that the price listed is an estimated value, this is an auction listing and price will be determined at time of sale, then of course we could put in any other information we want about the property, talking about the bedrooms and baths, what recent renovations it has, any other things that we want the general public to know. After we've done our public description, we've got a section, this is for private remarks that or is only seen by other members of MyStateMLS, after that, we've got both our virtual tour link and our youtube link and we can see the difference between these two by based on those two listings that we saw before, we can see that this listing in Louisiana, they use the virtual tour field and what that does is that allows you to put in any URL link and that's going to send that buyer to that other website wherever it is, so if you've got an auction site where you want people to submit their bids, I would suggest putting that in that virtual tour field, where that video tour is going to be that youtube link, that's going to embed a youtube video directly in the MyStateMLS listing.

Dave: So that's the difference between the virtual tour link and that youtube link, if you've got the tax information, you can go ahead and pop it in there, and after we've done that it's time to go ahead and upload our photos. Adding photos is incredibly easy, we allow you to just go ahead and do drag and drop, so I've got a folder here with all my photos of the property, I'm just going to drag them in and I'm going to click start upload, now what's going to happen here is this is going to upload all of my photos all at once and what's great about MyStateMLS is we allow up to 50 photos all in high res, so if you've got nice large full-screen photos of your listing, make sure you go ahead and upload those versions to your listing, because that's going to give those potential buyers the best view possible of the listing, after they've all uploaded, we can go through, reorder them into the order that we like best. If we want we can add captions, but we're all set, so we're going to go there. If we wanted to upload our listing agreement we would do it there, and then once we're all set, the listing is pretty much all set and done. Once the listing is officially live within the platform, it'll start syndicating out to those third-party sites, so those buyers are going to be able to see it on sites like realtor.com, zillow, and trulia.

Wrap Up:

Dave: So that does it for me today, again if you're not a member of MyStateMLS just yet, signing up for MyStateMLS is incredibly easy, like I showed you before just log on to www.mystatemls.com, click on that sign-up button right at the center of the screen and that's going to take you right through the process to get your account started. If you're an individual auctioneer we offer both monthly and yearly billing options. Membership is 40$ a month or 330$ for the full year, with monthly billing there is no long-term commitment and you can cancel at any time, yearly billing is going to save you a hundred and fifty dollars over that monthly price by committing to that full year up front. If you're a company and you've got multiple auctioneers within your company and you want to give MyStateMLS to all of your auctioneers, we also offer office pricing as well and the way that works is that gives MyStateMLS memberships to your entire sales team at a discounted rate if you'd like to take advantage of that office discount feel free to contact me. You can call me at 888-769-7657 or you can email me directly, get right into my inbox, that's going to be the best way to get in touch with me directly and that's dave@mystatemls.com. Thank you so much for joining me. We hope to see you at future webinars and we hope to see on MyStateMLS very soon have a great day! Bye.