What is IDX and Why is it Important to Selling Your Luxury Home?!

Today's post covers a very little know subject of IDX agreements, Real Estate Brokers and how this affects your ability to sell your home in today's Internet driven market!

There is a super secret statement made by every broker to the MLS in our area. It's called the IDX agreement. Every broker makes a statement the the MLS about whether it is okay to share their listings with other web sites, such as Realtor.com or competitor web sites like a Keller Williams Realty Listing showing up on a Re/Max web site. Most broker say 'yes', please share our listings with all available web sites. Why? Because they know that our area is driven by the Internet and exposure is king, no matter what web site their listing appears on. That same agreement requires those competing web sites to state somewhere in the posting which real estate brokerage is providing the listing. If the real estate broker truly wants to help the listing sell then sharing is king and absolutely paramount to success in Northern Virginia.

But some real estate brokers actually say 'no', do not provide our listings to anyone at all. Why? Well here are my thoughts. They are often old-school in my personal opinion. By this I mean that they are trying to keep all calls and all leads related to their listings tightly held in their grasp. The problem for sellers is that if the Broker's web site is not generating the highest web site traffic then this is a bad thing. And it's hard to compete with Realtor.com that generates about 5.7 million unique visitors per month! There is no local web site that can compete with that. I believe it is a huge disservice to a seller not to publish their listing to every web site that will accept it. Buyers come from all across the country not just locally. Someone in California may not think to try and search a local real estate broker's web site, especially if they do not even know it exists in the first place.

As for buyers trying to find that special home, they may just end up buying their 3rd best dream home because they never knew that just down the street their true dream home sitting in the middle of fox hunt country was for sale and at a price they would have been more then willing to pay.

If you are signing with a real estate broker ask them to tell you if their broker publishes their listing to all available web sites. Then ask them to show you a copy of a company Full Listing. The MRIS system we use in Northern Virginia shows on page 3 of a full listing printout what the advertising choice for that real estate broker is. For example a broker that does not want their listings shared with other sites will show [ Advertising: IDX-DNP ] at the bottom of page 3.

In closing make certain to do your home work and hopefully the post today will share information that most owners may not understand about the complexities of real estate listings in our MLS.