LIMITED SERVICE LISTINGS

If you’ve ever tried to sell real estate without a real estate agent, For Sale by Owner (or FSBO), you may discovered how difficult it can be to advertise your property. Sure, you can toss an ad up on Facebook, pin some flyers to the IGA bulletin board, tell your friends and family to spread the word, but it’s not easy to get a FSBO listing on the sites (Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia, etc.) that tend to garner the bulk of buyer attention. 

So how do real estate agents do it?

Well, real estate agents have access to what’s called the Multiple Listing Service, or more colloquially, the MLS. Through the MLS, real estate agents can list properties and feed those listings—through various data exchanges, most commonly referred to as IDX or Internet Data Exchanges—to both the prominent internet real estate sites but also other brokerages’ sites (as long as they have an IDX feed set up). Thus, agents are able, through a simple click of a button, to share a listing with hundreds if not thousands of potential buyers. 

Now, individuals selling their property themselves can still list through Zillow and such, but those sites don’t make it easy. And realtors just click a button. 

Now, you’ll never get access to the MLS without working with a realtor, but there is an option for limiting the realtor’s role in the transaction while still benefiting from the distribution value of the MLS. They’re called Limited Service Listings. 

These listings differ from traditional listings in that they’re commonly flat-fee transactions and the listing agent’s role in the transaction is limited, hence the name. Most basically, the agent could list the property on the MLS (and all that’s legally required of an agent prior to listing a property) and that’s it. The rest—showings, negotiation, closing the transaction, etc—are the responsibility of the property owner. The scope of the services provided is negotiable. 

There are obviously disadvantage to these types of agreements, but not many that wouldn’t exist in a traditional For Sale by Owner transaction. 

If a Limited Service Listing is something that sounds amenable to you, just know it’s an option. It’s not something, though, that all brokerages offer. 

LIMITED SERVICE LISTINGS