MLS rule cloaks sales price at request of buyer or seller

A new rule allows participants in a Northern California multiple listing service to cloak the actual sales price of homes at the request of a home buyer or seller -- and MLS members must pay a price for this information to be concealed from other members. RE InfoLink, a Silicon Valley-area MLS with about 21,000 members, stated in an Aug. 1 notice that its board of directors and reviewers at the National Association of Realtors approved a new policy that enables home buyers and sellers to withhold the selling price of a property as a condition of a transaction. The policy provides, "The listing agent will close the listing as sold using last list price as the sales price," and the fee to conceal the selling price ranges from $500 for the first instance to $5,000 for the fifth and subsequent instances. "It's not uncommon for an MLS to have a process that for some reason the clients don't want sales price disclosed," said Jim Harrison, RE InfoLink president and CEO. While RE InfoLink has ...