Google made your MLS listing more valuable. Here’s what to tell sellers

On Thursday, Google announced it is taking its home listing ads national. The new format puts real listings, with photos, pricing and home details, right inside mobile search results in all 50 states. Buyers can call, message or book an appointment with a local agent without ever leaving the search page. The rollout continues market by market through the summer.

Most agents will skim that headline and file it under “another tech story.” Don’t. This one changes the conversation at the kitchen table, and for once, it changes it in favor of the MLS.

Where buyers actually start

Quick question. Where does a buyer’s home search actually begin? Not on Zillow. Not on Redfin. Before a buyer ever opens a portal or an app, they type something into Google. “Homes for sale in Smithtown.” “Three-bedroom house near me.” Google sits in front of every portal, every brokerage site, every app. It is the front door to all the other front doors.

Now here is the detail that matters most in Thursday’s news: The listings inside those new Google ads come from the MLS. The data flows through HouseCanary’s ComeHome platform under agreements with participating MLSs. The supply for this entire program is MLS data.

Think about what just happened. For more than a year, we have watched this industry build detours around the MLS. Compass moved its listings onto Redfin before the MLS through its partnership with Rocket. Zillow built Preview with five big brokerage partners. Howard Hanna built HannaList. Every new program made the MLS a little less complete and a little less central.

Then the largest search company on earth surveyed this fractured mess and decided the cleanest, most complete, most reliable source of listings in America is still the MLS. Not one brokerage’s private inventory. Not a portal’s pre-market feed. The MLS.

The new kitchen table script

So ,what do you say to a seller who has been pitched a private listing or an office exclusive? You now have one of the simplest scripts in the business:

Buyers don’t start their search on any one website. They start on Google. And the homes Google shows them come from the MLS. If your home is on the MLS, it can show up the moment a buyer searches. If it isn’t, it’s invisible at the exact spot where the search begins.

That is not a scare tactic. That is geography. A listing that skips the MLS no longer just misses Zillow. It misses the starting line.

Pair that with the numbers you should already know cold. Zillow’s research team studied 2.72 million transactions and found that homes sold off the MLS brought in about 1.5 percent less nationwide. In states like California and New York, the gap grew to 3.7 percent, which is real money on a typical home.

More exposure means more buyers. More buyers mean more competition. More competition means a better price. Google just plugged the biggest exposure channel on the planet directly into the MLS.

And remember the balance. If a seller wants privacy, fewer strangers walking through the house, and one agent quarterbacking everything, those are real benefits, and it is their right to choose them. Your job is to make sure they choose with their eyes open.

The trade-off just got bigger, because the buyer pool they give up now includes everyone who starts on Google.

Now the fine print

Before we pop the champagne, three things you need to know.

1. The coverage is not national yet, even though the announcement is

Listings appear only where an MLS has signed an agreement, and so far, only three have: CRMLS, San Diego MLS and My State MLS. If your MLS has not joined, your listings are not in the program.

So, ask. Email your MLS leadership this week and find out what the plan is. This is one of those rare moments where agents pushing from the bottom can move an organization faster than any committee can.

2. There is a side door

EXp already sends its coming-soon listings directly to ComeHome, HouseCanary’s consumer site, which means pre-market inventory can reach Google’s world through a brokerage feed instead of through the MLS. If that side door widens, Google becomes one more pre-market stage instead of a reason to list on the MLS first. Watch it closely.

3. Remember how this movie ended last time

Twenty years ago, this industry handed its listing data to the portals for free, then spent two decades buying back leads generated from its own inventory.

Google’s new format is a paid product. Agents enroll in Local Services Ads and pay for the calls and appointments those MLS listings create.

That is not a reason to boycott. It is a reason for MLS leaders to negotiate smart terms now, while Google still needs them, instead of after the habit sets in. Which brings me to my last point.

One more thing, for the leaders reading this

Three MLSs signed on one at a time, through a single middleman, on terms the rest of us have never seen. There are more than 450 MLSs in this country. If each one negotiates alone with a company the size of Google, the terms get written by whoever signs first and swallowed by everyone who signs after.

The MLSs should be answering Google the way Google approached them: together, at one table. That is a conversation for CMLS and for their Open House Conference this September.

For over a year, the loudest voices in this business have been telling us the MLS is the last place a listing should start. On Thursday, the company that organizes the world’s information disagreed. Google looked at every private network, every pre-market feed, and every walled garden, and built its national home search on MLS data.

The companies building walls around their listings just got a reminder: Buyers don’t start their search inside anyone’s wall. They start with a search bar. And the search bar chose the MLS.