What Is MLS?

Multiple Listing Services or MLS

First Published Date: Apr 18, 2010

If you are planning on buying a home in Canada, then you will most likely be finding that home through MLS, unless you go through a private sale. MLS, or Multiple Listing Service, is a one-stop shop for all the homes that are listed through the major real estate agencies within Canada.

MLS has actually been around for quite a long time, finding its origins in the late 1800s when real estate brokers would gather in offices of their local associations to share the information about the properties that they were attempting to sell. They would do this under the agreement of compensating other brokers who helped them sell properties, and this created the basic principle of MLS.

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver claims to be the pioneer of MLS in Canada, and currently the MLS service in Canada has 98,000 members of the Canadian Real Estate Association, who work through the 101 real estate boards and 11 provincial/territorial associations.

MLS is extremely beneficial to you as a homebuyer for the following reasons:

1.    It allows you to search through properties based on location, price, services and more.

2.    It allows you to see pictures of a home anywhere in the country without ever having to travel to that area of the country.

3.    You can comparison shop homes in a wide area to find the home that is right for you.

Some people criticize MLS because it allows the realtors who use it to have a monopoly on listings. Roughly 80 percent of homeowners in Canada use MLS to find their home, so for realtors who are not listed on it, they lose out on a lot of potential business. Lawsuits have been launched to allow other realtors to list homes outside of MLS, but these have mostly been thrown down.

If you are doing a home search, you can either look on MLS yourself (www.mls.ca) or you can have an agent do it for you. When you do a search, you can search in a number of ways for the right home for you and your family.

·      Postal Code

·      Radius Search

·      Street/Subdivision

·      Price Range

·      Number of Bedrooms/Baths

·      Garages

·      Pools/Spas

·      Square Footage

Once you find your home, you can look through the pictures, find out where it is on a map and even e-mail the realtor questions about the place. This puts a lot of the control in your hands and in fact all you need the realtor for is to buy the house and inspect it when you are in the area.

MLS is a great service that really makes the entire process of finding a home much easier. You are able to find a great number of homes anywhere within the country through the easy map function. You can see exactly where the home is, what it looks like, the things it has and anything else you may need. Without MLS, it would actually be more complicated to find a home for average homeowners.