Real estate agents and brokers across the country will soon be able to search MLS listings and public records simultaneously.
Michigan’s largest MLS, Realcomp II Ltd., will be the first multiple listing service to roll out a new platform with this feature for its 13,100-plus members. TREND MLS in the Philadelphia area, which has about 28,000 members, is next. Both use CoreLogic’s Matrix MLS system.
Chris Bennett
“The development we are doing for Realcomp and TREND is the first step in CoreLogic’s larger strategy to bring an entirely new level of content-rich solutions to brokers and agents, and will eventually culminate in the launch of Matrix 360, the industry’s first truly property-centric multiple listing platform,” Chris Bennett, CoreLogic’s general manager of real estate solutions, told Inman via email.
Currently, 483,000 MLS subscribers use Matrix as their primary system, Bennett said — a number that rises each month as users migrate from soon-to-be-defunct CoreLogic platforms.
Come next year, MLS customers that subscribe to both Matrix and CoreLogic’s property information service, Realist, will get Matrix 360, which will combine the functionality of both into a single platform.
Realist has 157 MLS customers representing 754,000 subscribers. About half of these subscribers — 384,000 — belong to one of the 34 MLSs that offer both Matrix and Realist.
Agents and brokers will be able to search listings and tax records at the same time, view enhanced property and neighborhood information as part of the listing record, and enjoy built-in auto-population of new listings and CMA (comparative market analyses) comps from public record data, Bennett said.
“Under the Matrix 360 model, a listing is just one of many possible ‘child records’ of the property record,” he said.
“Matrix 360 will be a single, modular system with a unified architecture — and performance to match — rather than two separate systems with discrete integration points.
“To our knowledge, no one else has taken the concept of co-mingled listing and property data to this level.”
The new platform eliminates redundancies, upgrades the user experience for Realcomp members, and allows them to more easily access and compare data, Realcomp said. The single search functionality is set to go live for the MLS before the end of the year.
Karen Kage
According to Realcomp CEO Karen Kage, the feature will let Realcomp members create a CMA or an appraisal on a property and find a wider and more complete set of comparable properties, regardless of whether they were listed or sold through a Realcomp Realtor.
“[I]f there is a home that sold ‘by owner’ it may not in the MLS, however, those details of the sale would be included in public record data,” Kage told Inman in an email.
“An MLS subscriber running a CMA in the MLS would not see this record. Now that the databases are combined, they have access to more complete data to include FSBOs and any property that may have been listed with a non-MLS agent.”