Moving from Zillow to MLS in your property search

- [Instructor] Let me juxtapose it a little bit with Zillow before we move on. When you're on the phone with a seller, you're going to open up Zillow and you're going to get a really quick 30 seconds estimate of the value. As you're talking to them, you'll type in the address up it will pop up and you can compare it to the map on Zillow. That can tell you if you want to set an appointment right away or not. But once you're off the phone, once you have hung up with that seller, you're going to get on the MLS or call your agent to send you out MLS comps, and that's allow you to get a better, closer and more fine tuned assessment of the situation to determine whether or not you want to keep the appointment with the seller, once you leave your desk, or if you want to call the seller back and cancel that appointment. Let me go now and show you some examples of searches that you can get just to send you from the MLS. Just like with Zillow, I don't have time in this presentation to show you all of the features and everything that the MLS can do. But, I wanted to make sure I gave you a couple of examples of the powerful information you can get directly from the MLS. Remember I said that going without the MLS is like going naked in the Arctic. Well I mean it. This example here is an example of an agent that sent me a lead. And of course, I went to Zillow and quickly determined that it was worth going to look at the property after all the seller wanted about $155,000. And Zillow told me that the house could easily sell for 230 to 260. I decided to ask the agent did go ahead and send me MLS listings to see if it really was worth going to the property. Well, you'll notice that the agent sent me a variety of what we call comparative market analysis. Now I know that might be a new term, but all that really means is that the agent put in the search criteria and the computer gave to her analysis that compared my home to the criteria of other homes that she put into the search. And this was a view or a listing of all homes in that area. Now, I've trained my agent to look broad and then to go narrower. Now, of course, I've trained my agent because I've never gotten my real estate license. I've preferred to let other agents do my work and do my searches. And so she did a broad search to which we could look at the information but then she took a search with everything and then she narrowed it down to site built only. Site built means that they showed up with the wood and they built the house there, versus, for example, a manufactured home or a mobile home. So, she did a site built only, well then, she went ahead in this search, she did a site built, but she really narrowed it down. There was a neighboring neighborhood where the homes were worth a lot more and she removed those from the evaluation, so that got a little more specific. As she worked down, she gave me a lot of data that helped me prepare to make my offer. If I were to click on one of these, you would see something that looks a lot like this.