I just attended a class held by Amy Davis, MLS Teacher Extraordinaire! In this class she focused on the new Realtor.com/Find 
system that was recently added to our local MLS arsenal of tools. For those in the Western North Carolina system, the button for this new tool is located on the home page, along the right hand side, with other things like CMA's and Co-op Data. If you are in other systems around the country, ask your Board of Realtors if your system has included this function. According to Amy, more and more boards are adding it as well.
At first I really did not get why we needed this tool. It is a National Search for properties all over the Nation, not just for sale. You can look up homes for sale in any town in the USA, or any address. It is still a system being built, so not every single county is there, but it sure looks close to complete to me. Every Friday our MLS system is updated, with more counties joining in.
So here is a good reason for using it. Say Mr and Mrs Buyer come into your office. They are looking for a high end home. They find a home and want to make an offer. They say they have a property in another state that is under contract and will be closing any day now. Rather than make them feel uncomfortable with verification, you can actually look them up, either by name, or address. Their property will come up, and it will tell you if it is on the market, or not. And if it is on the market, you can verify whether it is Pending or not. They are none the wiser. And no akward moments.
The system has a lot of information that can be searched. Locally, it holds all records from the courthouse as well. So any county that has participated in this program will have shared property information, what ever that county has decided to share. For example in Henderson County where I reside, we can see the minute a property has been foreclosed on by a bank. Not in the MLS, but from the Courthouse records. Wow, how would you like to be in this loop?
There are all kinds of things available in this system. Understand that the first time you log into Find, it will ask you to complete your profile. You can skip this for the moment, but if you forget and later want to send out reports from this system, they will go out, but with none of your information on them. So do this right off. There also seems to be more data in Find, than in the other systems we have access to.
There are so many things in the system that I can't even begin. But if you are in the area and see that Amy is teaching a class on Realtor.Com/Find, I would sign right up. I can't even do it justice, since today was my first experience with it.
There is a really good help section, complete with PDF's and video tutorials, so if you can't make a class, or if you are not in our area but have access to Find, just go there. It will get you up and running very fast.
I hope that Realtor.com/Find comes to your MLS office soon, if it has not already! I am pretty sure that if you take the time to learn all it has to offer, you will be pleased with it.
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