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Most consumers don’t know about one of the most powerful tools in real estate.
About 24% have a vague idea of the MLS acronym, slightly more think it means “Major League Soccer,” and 76% have “no idea” how the MLS benefits them, according to the Council of Multiple Listing Services.
They’ll likely recognize any number of websites that show properties for sale, but they probably won’t know those platforms use data from multiple listing services around the country.
In the simplest terms, an MLS is a marketplace connecting agents working on behalf of sellers and buyers. MLSs are operated on the local and regional level across the country.
And while multiple listings services have become more robust and innovative over the years, the goal of connecting those looking to sell with those looking to buy has remained unchanged for nearly 140 years.
The Beginning
The San Diego Real Estate Board (today the San Diego Association of REALTORS®) is credited with creating the first multiple listings service in 1885.
“They had in their bylaws a clause: Each local office that was a member of the San Diego Real Estate Board was required to furnish every member with a list of all the properties that were for sale or had been sold or withdrawn from the market by 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. every business day,” Frederik Heller, NAR’s director of library operations and information strategy, says. “They would use runners to distribute lists to their members throughout the city.”
But the first description of a listing exchange didn’t appear until 1910 from Illinois’ Cook County Real Estate Board. At biweekly member meetings, listings were written on a large blackboard before being transferred onto cards and placed in a rack on the exchange wall. From there a weekly typewritten bulletin would go out to members.
“This system places in the hands of each board member the best offerings of every other member and secures wide co-operation in the disposal of properties,” the Cook County board wrote in the National Real Estate Journal over a century ago.
NAR 1911 President Samuel Thorpe called it the “only modern, sane and effective way of selling real estate.”
Over the next few years listing exchanges started popping up in big cities across the East and West coasts. By 1922, 50 boards out of about 470 operated an MLS, with new ones being established “at the rate of two boards per week,” the National Real Estate Journal said.
Many local boards began advertising the benefits of the system to consumers.
“They would say, when you list your property with this REALTOR® and they use the MLS, then you’ll actually have ‘90 real estate offices and 400 salespeople working for you’ instead of just the one,” Heller says.
Technology Takeover
The addition of photographs forever changed the way brokers sold properties, with the first ones appearing on local New Jersey and Louisiana MLSs in 1925.
“That’s really when you start seeing the technology start to develop,” Heller says.
Over the next half a century, the use of technology exploded with the use of multilith machines printing listings with photos in the ’50s, the IBM punch card sorting system and the first computerized MLS in the ’60s. While the computer revolution was underway, local associations compiled listings into books that were mailed or hand-delivered to MLS participants.
Real estate professionals were tech visionaries.
Eugene Konstant, with the executive office of the North Woodward Board of REALTORS® in Michigan, predicted the use of video tours in1969:
“The day is not too distant when a photographer will walk up the front walk of a home with a video camera instead of a still camera, to photograph the approach, each room of the interior, and backyard landscaping. Your prospect will view the whole thing on video-phones supplied by the phone company and a stop action button (similar to the hold button on your current phone) will stop the camera action while your prospect looks the interior of each room over carefully . . . in color . . . in three-dimension . . . a thousand miles away.”
Boards continued to embrace technology in the advancement of MLSs.
In 1981 NAR acquired the RISCO MLS software system, which was first used by the Greater Salem Board of REALTORS® and which could handle multiple listing services as well as management and accounting tasks. Accessible by computer terminals located at board offices, the MLS software enabled brokers to quickly enter listing information and to filter available properties by certain criteria.
“It frequently took a week or more to get a new listing into the book, and even then the listing was not accessible on the basis of buyer limitations,” Larry Kesselring, manager of computer service for NAR, told REALTOR® News in 1982. “The broker would have to go through his multiple listing book page by page to select homes meeting buyer specifications.”
CD-ROM players were viewed as a portable alternative to printed MLS books. Featured at the trade expo during an NAR meeting in 1994, the devices could be plugged into televisions and pocket-sized palmtop computers.
MLS Proliferation
Today, with the advent of the internet, MLSs have evolved into robust local and regional online databases that compile home listings from brokerages. NAR calls them the “most trusted source for real estate data because their information is verified by real estate professionals.” Real estate agents who are members of an MLS have access to information about properties that have sold or are for sale, including listing prices, addresses, features, disclosures and square footage.
There are 532 residential multiple listing services operating across the country with millions of subscribers, according to Realtors Property Resource®.
That number doesn’t account for the millions of home sellers and buyers who rely upon and benefit from the MLS and its data.
In fact, browsing properties online was the first step in the house-hunting process for 43% of buyers in 2024, according to NAR data. Most buyers, 51%, found their homes through online searches, highlighting just how beneficial open access to MLS data has become for consumers. That’s especially true when combined with the expertise of real estate agents, whom buyers ranked as the most useful sources of information in the home search process.
Innovators continue to imagine what’s next for the future of MLSs. For example, as some brokerages expand their service areas and consumers require information beyond their local markets, MLSs are sharing data to create a better consumer experience, and as technology advances, MLSs will continue to offer new tools and insights.
One thing is for certain: Multiple listing services have forever transformed and improved the way houses are bought and sold in America by connecting sellers, buyers and agents.
