Using Your MLS – Retrieving and Reporting Sales Data
Uncertainty is bad for business. Buyers are anxious and sellers insecure. Daily news stories on foreclosures, recession, and falling prices create strong emotions around real estate transactions. Everyone’s afraid of being taken advantage of. Realtors need a better way to communicate with clients about the market.
Having objective, detailed information on conditions tailored to their specific market helps people see reason. Realtors who have the information and can help their clients understand it are at a distinct advantage in this atmosphere.
Lots of good information on the market … sales, average price, inventory, market time … can be calculated with data that you, as an authorized user, can download from your MLS system. All it takes is a little time and a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel that helps with the calculations and can create easy-to-understand charts like the one below.
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In this article, we’re going to focus on number of sales and average sale price over a 2-year period. Most real estate data varies by time of year, so it’s important to compare, say, July of 2008 with July of 2007 and 2006.
Start by logging into your MLS system and going to the property search. Keep in mind that different MLSs name things differently, but you should be able to figure it out.
1) Set the search criteria
a) Choose a Town.
b) Set the Status. We want to search for properties in a status of “Closed” or “Sold”.
c) Specify a beginning and ending “Closed Date”. For example, January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2008. (Note: some MLS systems restrict the number of listings you can search for or export. If you get a message indicating you’ve selected too many records, reduce the Closed Date range and do multiple exports)
d) Since single families are a different market from condominiums, you will probably want to choose a Property Type as well, say Single Family.
e) In addition, you may want to exclude mobile homes, cottages, timeshares, or other types of properties that would distort your results.
2) Here the MLSs differ.
a) In some, you have to Select a report format … choose Excel or comma-separated values (CSV).
b) In others, you run the Search. The MLS displays a table of results with one line per listing.
i) If the table includes the Closed Date and Sale Price, go ahead and Export it.
ii) If Closed Date and Sale Price are not included, they need to be added to the report. Check with the MLS on how to customize a report if you don’t know how to do it.
3) From here, select the Export function and follow the steps to save the exported file on your system.
4) If you haven’t done so already, download the SoldReport spreadsheet
a) Go to www.RealtyMarketUpdate.com
b) Click on the “Free Tools & White Papers” link
c) Select SoldReport and save it to your system
5) Check the sale prices. Sometimes rentals are misclassified as sales or an extra zero is added to the Sale Price.
a) Open the MLS spreadsheet
b) Sort all the data by Sale Price
c) Look for very low numbers. If necessary, look up the listing in the MLS. If it looks like a rental, delete it.
d) Look for big differences between List Price and Sale Price. It’s usually safe to assume that the List Price is correct. If the Sale Price is about 1/10 of the List Price, probably a zero is missing. If it’s 10X the List Price, probably one zero too many.
6) Transfer the data to the SoldReport spreadsheet
a) Open the spreadsheet from the MLS and the SoldReport spreadsheet.
b) If you haven’t done so already, delete the sample data from SoldReport (all the cells with the blue background)
c) On the MLS spreadsheet, select all the Closed Dates and choose Copy. Then Paste them into SoldReport under the “Closed Date” heading.
d) Do the same with Sale Price.
7) Now, in the Results section of SoldReport, you should see # Sales and Average Sale Price by month for your data. And the charts at the right will show it graphically.
Paul Evans
© 2009, Realty Market Update, LLC