Have suggestions for products that you’d like to see reviewed by our real estate technology expert? Email Craig Rowe.
MLS Offers is a transaction communication and negotiation platform for real estate agents.
Platforms: Browser-based
Ideal for: All size agents and teams; boards and associations
Top selling points
- Ease of use
- Consolidation of all transaction data
- Avoids email-based communications during offer periods
- Free to use
Top concerns
- Manual entry of listing data may slow some adoption until more MLS feeds can be connected to the system.
What you should know
MLS Offers is the type of software I like to watch being demonstrated. (It launched only last week.)
It focuses on one aspect of buying and selling homes — the communication of offers — and is bent on improving it.
That’s what technology should do, especially in such a nuanced business environment like real estate. It’s also not trying to “disrupt” anything; it’s merely aiming to offer a dependable agent support tool for the improved sale of homes.
MLS Offers engages buyer and listing agents at the point of offer.
Clicking a link saved in an MLS listing page opens the platform, into which the offering party enters all the pertinent information, ranging from contingencies to financing type.
The software also requires an actual formal document offer be included as an attachment.
I can envision this manual document inclusion being a slight turnoff for some, but MLS Offers isn’t an electronic forms tool.
However, by scraping and nicely organizing all points of an offer and ensuring the back-and-forth stays within a single online environment, the software keeps its promise of improving the process.
Each offer adjustment during negotiation is made clear and tracked, and an organized list of current listings and offers makes it easy for users to stay on top of their pipeline.
Upon acceptance of an offer, MLS Offers allows each party access to the same screen to review dates, enter names of vendors and lenders, confirm commission amounts, and stay abreast of progress.
A number of additional touches help cover the bases, like standard messaging to accompany each offer or counter, a contact list, email alerts to new activity, property images and the ability to counter multiple offers at one time.
MLS Offers recently secured a partnership with the Miami Association of Realtors and is working on several others.
This will eventually include a checkbox to auto-generate an MLS Offers account upon the approval of a new listing.
It should be noted that the team behind MLS Offers also brought to the industry ebrokerhouse.com, an online tool for real estate business and transaction management launched in 2009.
MLS Offers was spawned from the popularity of its web-based offer feature.
In short, this is a team that knows how to build online transaction tools.
I see no reason to not believe their latest product will be any less successful.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
