4 Days is the New 2 Months
In Ancient times, pre 1996 in Kansas City, the dissemination of data regarding homes for sale could take two to three months to reach the intended recipients, the buyers.
In the old days, an agent would consult with someone who wanted to sell their home and they would agree on a selling agreement. The agent would take the listing to the agent's office and process the paperwork. The agent would discuss the new listing at the weekly office sales meeting to inform the other agents in the office that the home was for sale and about the characteristics of the home, price, address, amenities etc. The information on the home for sale would eventually make it into a large Multiple Listing Book tome, put out monthly. Agents would flip through the pages of the book to discover other homes for sale. This was obviously a long and tedious process. Depending on when the selling agreement was obtained and the listing processed, the house might take as long almost two months to get into the MLS book, depending on when the cut-off dates for publication of the book fell in regards to when the listing agreement was processed. It could easily take another 2-3 weeks for all the agents to look through the book to review it for homes which would meet their potential buyer client's needs.
Price changes and or incentives would face a similar scenario as the information would face a similar path and timeline for distribution and assimilation by agents.
In 1996, the MLS went online, albeit in DOS mode. Agents could search for homes that had been entered in the computer system in some fashion. In Kansas City there were multiple MLS organizations so if an agent wanted to see all the data the agent had to belong to multiple organizations and pay multiple dues. Not all agents did that.
Around the year 2000, the varied MLS organizations merged into one. All agents who were members of the MLS could see all of the other member's houses for sale. Eventually there were improvements to the system where agents could set up property profiles for customers who were interested in a particular type of property. Individual brokerages started developing software that would improve the methods of distributing the data to agents and customers, streamlining the process and increasing the speed.
In 2007 when a new listing is processed and entered in the local MLS computer system the data is accessible instantly to all agents who do a manual search. Most of the large brokerages in town have software which allows their customers to set up a profile of characteristics for the home they want and to be notified by email when a new home matching their criteria becomes available. Most of these systems will notify the buyer in 2 to 48 hours depending on the brokerage. Realtor.com will generally recognize the house is for sale in 48-72 hours. All the worldwide data bases which download data from Realtor.com will recognize the home is for sale in 72-96 hours from the time the house is entered in the local MLS.
The advantage to the Seller and Buyer is that what used to take 60-90 days to ensure the world knew the home was for sale now takes roughly 4 days. The data is more widespread too and less dependent on a manual search and manual distribution.
An important reason about why to recognize the differences in today vs. 2000 or pre-1996 is that when a home sells in less than 30 days does not necessarily mean the home was priced too low, but rather that the dynamics of how long it would take someone, buyer or agent, to find out the home was for sale has changed for the better.
contact information updated 07/29/2009
If you have any questions or are thinking of buying or selling a home in Johnson County Kansas please contact me at 913.908.2215 or Ken@Ken-Jansen.com . Expert information on the Kansas City Real Estate Market
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