* Spoiler Alert *
Let’s cut to the end of the movie. There is no way for any Realtor to get you access to allll the listings before they get to Realtor.ca (aka MLS® which is a trademark, not a place, but that’s another story.
The evolution of how listings arrived on Realtor.ca is quick the epic technological journey. Here is a (very) rough timeline:
10 years ago or so, listings were faxed to the Niagara Association of Realtors (NAR) to be uploaded by staff who sat at a computer and manually typed all of the data in. As a result, you could have a listing go effective on a Wednesday, plonk a sign in the ground and it might appear on “the system” on Friday afternoon or Monday, depending on how backed up the NAR office was.
Those listings weren’t widely known (via the computer) though until they were uploaded from the NAR system to Realtor.ca. The listings appearing on Realtor.ca were at the mercy of waiting until the upload happened. Back then it was an overnight upload. So yes, you could get listings sent to you by a Realtor at 4pm that weren’t seen by the general public via Realtor.ca until the next morning.
In a market back then where the average home sold in 50+ days, that 4 or 5 hour head start wasn’t as huge an advantage as you’d think.
Then about 6 or 7 years ago, brokerload came along which gave the REALTOR® the ability to upload their own listings directly onto the board’s system. This took the NAR staff member entering data out of the equation which sped things up significantly.
Fun Fact: a lot of Realtors protested the concept
of having to brokerload their own listings. Here
we are a handful of years later and as an industry, I don’t
think we could imagine going back to the old way.
Still, regardless of how fast the listing went from our computer to the NAR computer system (Realtor intraweb), we were waiting for the upload to Realtor.ca. Good news is by this time it was sped up.
A few times a day. Then 4 or 5 times a day. So, as the upload times increased, the “sign up to see listings before everyone else does” approach became less and less relevant. Or true.
So here we are in 2019.
Brokerload is now a mandatory thing meaning all Realtors (or their admins or staff) upload their listings directly to the Realtor’s system (known as Matrix). From there the upload to Realtor.ca is 10 minutes or so. All the time. Every day.
So, the concept of signing up as a Buyer to receive Realtor.ca listings before the general public sees them is officially a decades old practice.
Unless you want to receive a new listing 8 minutes before someone else does. In which case, you should TOTALLY sign up for our Buyer email!
Hope that helps. Questions? Looking for helping with navigating the market in 2019?
Reach out to us anytime. We’re here to help.
…and many thanks to etaplus for the old skool computer photo.
Thanks for visiting
THEbTEAM