Sacramento Real Estate Blog

Earlier this week I attended the mandatory training for a new Realtor® board I joined, the Bay East Association of Realtors®. I joined this board a few weeks back because I was working on my Oakland real estate site and wanted to start placing referrals out in the Bay Area.

Of course, almost everything we do has unintended consequences, and in this case I think there are some really cool unintended consequences if you’re thinking about using me as your listing agent. It turns out that — for Sacramento County at least — the East Bay MLS has a way to add listings from Sacramento County, which in turn would expose your home to more Bay Area Realtors.

Don’t all agents do that?

Let me back up a minute. Contrary to popular belief, there’s not a single “MLS” (Multiple Listing Service) covering the whole world or even the whole State of California. Instead, there are a bunch of little regional MLS companies covering different areas. A web site like Realtor.com that looks like a national database is actually pulling data from a large set of regional databases. But other than that, those regional MLS databases don’t mix.

So when you hire an agent from this area to list your home, your home gets placed in the local MLS — known as Metrolist, and that’s great! Just by doing that, the listing data is available to all our local buyers agents, and it goes up to web sites like this one, and it gets a listing on national sites like Realtor.com.

But let’s say a Bay Area agent is looking for a home for a buyer who might be moving or investing here. If they look on this web site or Realtor.com, then sure, they’ll find your listing. But what if they check their own MLS (maybe out of convenience, or maybe because they want to find out something they care about like how to show your home or what they’ll get paid if they bring a buyer for your home)? Well, if they look in their own MLS, they won’t find your listing, unless you happen to be a lucky seller whose listing agent is a member of both boards.

Hint hint: that’s me!

Why doesn’t this happen automatically? Well, lots of local MLS companies have reciprocal arrangements with other MLS companies. Lots do, but Sacramento doesn’t. But the neat thing is, the Bay East Association does have such an arrangement with lots of other boards, through an arrangement called the MLS Alliance. This alliance permits agents from many other counties to view each other’s listings.

This means that if you can get your home listed in both Metrolist and any MLS Alliance area (such as the Bay East association I belong to), it will get better exposure to all the agents throughout the mlsalliance area.

The table below shows the counties where buyers agent will most likely be able to view your home if you list with any agent. It also shows the additional counties where buyers agents will be able to view your home directly through their own MLS or the MLS alliance if you list it with me: