Transcript: What is the Best MLS for Commercial Real Estate? 

Introduction: 

 Dave: Hello and good afternoon! Welcome to My State MLS my name is Dave and thank you for joining us today for today's webinar on the MLS for commercial real estate. So, if you're joining us today chances are you are a commercial real estate broker, you're an agent or maybe you just dabble in both residential and commercial real estate. Maybe you're a traditional residential agent or salesperson and you want to start diving into the world of commercial real estate. So that's awesome! Thank you for joining us today, we're going to be talking about the commercial landscape and how commercial properties whether their listings or rentals are handled by the MLS and how MyStateMLS  is the MLS for commercial real estate.  

 Question and Answer: 

 Dave: So the first thing that I want to do is I want to ask you a couple of questions, and first I just want to know if as a commercial real estate broker are you a member of your local MLS?  

 Dave: So go ahead click on your screen, you're going to be able to go ahead and pop in your answer right there, just select 'yes' you are a member of your local MLS or 'no' you are not. All right, we're going to do is we're going to close down that poll and I'm going to share the results with everyone and actually I'm surprised by this one 80% of you with us are already part of your MLS but, I'm actually surprised that a lot of people are not actually members of their local MLS, so which makes me ask the question: How are you going out and marketing real estate listings whether they're commercial or just traditional residential listings? I'd be certainly interested in how you're doing that.  

 Dave: Before we move forward, I've got one last question for you that are already using your local MLS. I want to know if your MLS accepts commercial listings.  

 Dave: All right I'm going to go ahead and shut down this poll, and this one also surprised me as well because I really was expecting to see a 100% across the board, but surprisingly there are some of you out there whose MLS does not accept commercial real estate listings. So for you, you may be trying to find a way to get your commercial listings in front of other brokers, in front of members of the public on different third-party sites on the internet and that's probably why you're joining us today is you're trying to find a solution that's going to give you the most exposure on your listings, whether they are commercial rentals, there are commercial leases, it's a commercial building for sale, it's a multi-unit for sale, that's what you're here for today.  

 Dave: So now what I want to do is I want to ask you the question is, What features is your MLS missing when it comes to helping you market and promote your commercial real estate listings? 

 Dave: Because I'm very interested in hearing what today's attendees have to say just because of all the calls that we receive from members across the country whether they're part of their local MLS or maybe they're not using their MLS. Everyone has a different story and they all come across different hardships or problems that may not cater to how they like to do their business, some people saying that they just don't have listing syndication for commercial listings, so when they put their commercial listing into the MLS, it doesn't really go anywhere, so they're not sure if they're getting any exposure for their listings. They're not sure if people are able to see it. They don't know if it's going anywhere. Other people say that they don't have the necessary fields to properly enter their commercial listings especially with a multi-unit or a mixed use building. You want to be able to put in all the information about that particular property, but if your MLS platform doesn't allow for that you're already doing everyone a disservice because you're not able to tell everyone what's in that building, what are the features of that building, is there a store downstairs and residential apartments upstairs? Other problems people are experiencing is there's just not enough data out there, so they can't find good comps for their properties when they're putting listings in just getting access to the other brokers, so yeah, a lot of complaints from a lot of different people and that's where MyStateMLS comes in, and this is where I hope that we can certainly help.  

 Dave: So let's go ahead and talk about MyStateMLS  and the problems that commercial real estate brokers face on a day-to-day basis. So the first thing is missing fields, we know that the MLS or the Multiple Listing Service is the main way that real estate brokers share and post their listings, but as some of you have already stated in the comments section, most MLS's are designed around traditional residential listings and this might mean no or very little field specific to commercial properties. Reading some of your comments coming in now, there are missing fields about the specifics about zoning, about how a specific property is zoned, other people are talking about the type of lease, so they're just missing different features that they wish that their local MLS would have whether it's a triple net, what kind of lease is included with that property.  

 Dave: So that's what we're talking about is missing fields from your MLS platform. Another issue that a lot of brokers or agents have, when it comes to putting their commercial listings into their MLS is they say where do my listings go? Where is it now? So we know that commercial brokers encounter a lack of exposure a lot. We already know that a lot of third-party sites do not accept commercial listings, but on top of that not every MLS will work to add more syndication options out there to accommodate those commercial brokers and those commercial agents, so usually you join an MLS and you get what you get. You don't see MLS's traditionally going out and trying to find new websites to syndicate their members listings and really that's where MyStateMLS is completely different and this is one of the things that i pride myself on as well as all of MyStateMLS is not only has MyStateMLS been designed with commercial real estate in mind, but our custom platform includes the fields specific to commercial real estate listings and we actually syndicate to sites that specialize in commercial real estate and I've taken upon myself personally is I've gone out and I've reached out to commercial websites to try to see if we can send our members commercial listings to those sites and that's really what sets MyStateMLS apart from your traditional local MLS is the people that are behind the scenes here at MyStateMLS, myself included is we're in the business to help you do your business. We want to see you flourish, we want to see you succeed and you're not going to be able to do that if you've got a platform behind you that's not really there to support you and that's what we're here to do is we're here to support you and try to get your listings on as many sites possible and that's what we really do here at MyStateMLS.  

 Dave: So, if this is your first time joining us for one of these webinars, you're probably asking well all right, that's great but what is MyStateMLS? I've never heard of you before, how come I haven't heard of you before? Well, MyStateMLS is a nationwide MLS and referral network that's been doing this for over a decade now. We started in New York as the NyStateMLS, a few years later after that we created our nationwide platform and now we have members across the entire country. So no matter where you are in the US, chances are someone in your state, someone in your area is already using MyStateMLS  to get more exposure on their listings, they're using it as a listing tool and they're using it to have an advantage over you and any other competition that might be in their area. So who's using it? Like I said we're already seeing MyStateMLS  being used by individual brokers, by individual agents, we're also seeing brokers bring their entire offices over to MyStateMLS  to use our nationwide platform and they're doing that to get more exposure on their listings, they're using MyStateMLS  as a listing tool, as a selling tool and as I said the combination of all those things is allowing them to have an advantage over their competition. When you go on a listing appointment, chances are you're not the only agent or broker that a potential client is meeting with, that homeowner that property owner is probably meeting with multiple brokers from your area. So what you need to do is you need to set yourself apart from your competition by offering something that the others have not offered. So we see MyStateMLS  members from all different types of situations and one of them being the broker, the agent, the company, they're already part of their local MLS that's great, but what they want to do is they join MyStateMLS as an additional tool to not only offer the agents within the company but to able to offer to those sellers when they're listing their home. So they're going to go to that homeowner, they're going to that commercial property owner, that property manager and they can say, yeah I'll put your listing into the local MLS just like everyone else, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to go above and beyond and I'm going to put your listing into a Nationwide MLS, so it's going to be seen by brokers and agents, not only across the state but across the entire country and we've done the math and if you just get one extra listing by using that sales tactic, if that property sells, the commission on that property could pay for your MLS membership for years over. So it's certainly a small investment to get some big gains.  

 Dave: So that's kind of one of the ways that MyStateMLS can help. Because again we understand that commercial real estate is different from traditional real estate and that's why we try to give more tools and options to commercial brokers and their sales team, so what do we mean by that? Again we talked about it, we saw in some of your comments is you want to be able to differentiate the type of lease for a property, you want to be able to have those fields specific to your commercial properties, you want to be able to explain what kind of units are in that multi-unit building, you want to be able to explain what kind of lease is with that property and you're going to be able to do that with MyStateMLS, not only that myself and the rest of the team here at MyStateMLS. We want to make sure that you're succeeding in your business and one of the ways that we can help do that is by offering enhanced listing syndication and I mean it when we go out we try to find new sites that we can send our members listings to all the time. I'm always reaching out to different websites trying to get more options for our members and what we're gonna do is we've recently partnered with a website that specializes in commercial listings, so that way your commercial properties are going to sites designed for commercial listings. So what I want to do right now is I want to go ahead jump into MyStateMLS  and take a look at some of that listing syndication in action. So if you're not a member of MyStateMLS  just yet don't worry you can join anytime, super easy to do all you do is go to www.mystatemls.com,  you'll click on that sign up button right at the center of the screen that's going to take you right through the process to get your account started and what's cool about MyStateMLS  is not only do we have individual pricing at 40$ a month or 330$ for a full year, we also offer discounted pricing as well with individual pricing, if you choose 40$ a month there's no long term commitment and you can cancel at any time. If you sign up as an individual at that yearly rate you can save 150$ over that monthly price by committing to that full year, if you're a broker, you're a sales team we do have that discounted office rate as well and the way that works is we use a sliding scale and we give accounts to all of your agents within your company, while the office pays a greatly reduced bundled rate and what I'll do if you're interested in office pricing I'll put my information up at the end of this webinar so you can contact me directly to get more information about some office pricing and options for you.  

 Dave: Before we got started today I pulled up a couple of things that I want to do, like I said MyStateMLS  from different corners of the country to just see how they're going out and being syndicated. What I wanted to do today is feature our newest partner that specializes in commercial real estate, so I've pulled up this listing here in Idaho, we can see this is a commercial building a property type is commercial, about 1.5 million dollars, we can open it up we can see we've got that nice large photos listing, we've got all the information about the property and here it is on brevitas.com, so brevitas is a brand new commercial real estate website that specializes in commercial real estate listings, so here it is we can see that we've got the nice large photos as they were entered into MyStateMLS and one of the really cool things about our partnership with brevitas is going back to this listing on the MLS.I'm going to go to a public view real fast, as we can see this was listed by joe pearl from Pearl Realty LLC, when we look at the listing on brevitas we can see exactly who it's offered by and the company, what's really great about this is unlike some Third-party sites where if you fill out that feedback form and you don't know where it's going, with brevitas right now the way we have our agreement with them is when you send your commercial listings to brevitas.com that feedback, that question, that i'd like to put in offer email, that's going to go directly to your inbox and we can see on this listing coming from MyStateMLS . 

 Dave: All right so now we're going to move a little east. We're going to head on over to New York. This one in Brooklyn again looks like another shop. Superior transcribing was the company that was in there, so we got this nice office building here in Brooklyn New York, we can see uh 549 thousand, we've got our marketing text here from Joseph Baglio at Madison Estates and Associates, again heading out over to brevitas we can see again posted by Joseph Baglio from Madison Estates and Associates, we can see all the photos, the listing description he added as well right on brevitas his website and lastly heading on south we've got a commercial building in Woodworth Louisiana and I brought this one up because this one's really cool is not only is it a commercial listing but it's actually a commercial auction listing, again heading on over to brevitas again we can see here it is that commercial auction listing as it appears on brevitas. So I just wanted to give you a quick rundown and show you exactly how listings syndicate out to different commercial websites including our brand new partnership with brevitas.com. Last thing I want to do now is I want to head on into MyStateMLS, I'm going to go right into my MyStateMLS account and I want to show you exactly what it looks like when you put that commercial listing into the MyStateMLS platform. And to do that i'm just going to go ahead and click on add new listing from my left hand sidebar menu and what's really cool about the listing wizard that we've created for the mystatemls platform is instead of it being one long listing sheet we actually break it down into a bunch of smaller steps so that way if you ever need to get pulled away from your desk you realize you have to be in a meeting in a couple minutes, you don't have to worry about losing all the work that you've already put into the property, all you have to do is make sure that you've clicked on the next step and everything that you've done up until that point has been saved as a draft and you can come back and finish it at any time.  

 Dave: So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and we're going to quickly put in a commercial listing. So to do that the first thing that we're going to want to do is scroll on down to property type and you're going to see we have lots of different options when it comes to what types of property we allow into the MyStateMLS  platform of course we have all of our different residential options we also have our multi-unit and our commercial buildings as well, so I'm going to go ahead and let's just do a commercial building and we're going to do it for sale and what's going on behind the scenes is because of what we're selecting on this page that's going to go ahead and change the other steps that are later on in the listing process and just to show you exactly what I mean by how it transforms itself let's see right now. I selected for sale and because of that it's going to make me have a listing price but if I was to go ahead and select something like for sale auction instead of the price it now switches over to estimated value and gives me all these different fields as they pertain to an auction listing. Let's go back to for sale we're going to do a commercial building for 1.25 and you'll notice I've got multiple states in my state drop down and that's because if I was licensed in multiple states under the same brokerage I can associate multiple state licenses all with the same account all for the same price, so if you're licensed in multiple states under the same brokerage you can associate all of those states to one account for the same low price. So I'm just going to pop in a fake address here and you'll notice anything that's in a red field is going to be required, anything in black is an optional field but of course you're going to want to make sure it's as complete as possible. Going back to some of the questions and comments you had about what you wish your MLS had, I do remember someone seeing different specifics about zoning it looks like you probably don't have zoning available to you in your MLS, but this is where MyStateMLS  really gives you a lot of different options, not only do we have zoning, so we've got all the different zoning here as well we have all the different property classes as well.Again anything in red is going to be a required field, black is an optional field but of course you're going to want your listing to be as complete as possible. So again fill out as much as you can. In addition not everything is set in stone so if you need to change something down the road you need to fill something out later on you can go ahead and do that at any time. So I've gone ahead and put in my address. If this looks correct on the map I can just go on the next step or if I need to see how the commercial building is actually right here on this corner you just go ahead move my pin to where I need to and click next step. 

 Dave: So we go through, we can go ahead, put in our contract type, our list date, our expiration date and of course we have permission from the property owner to sell the property and we agree to the listing terms and conditions. So as I said before MyStateMLS tries to give as many options when it comes to syndication to our members and here are all the options that we have for our members, we're going to notice that some of them are grayed out right now and that is because these sites do not accept commercial listings at this time, so sites like zillow, trulia, realtor.com, homes and home finder, unfortunately they do not accept commercial listings at this time, but we still have these options here on your page when you put in a listing because if they ever change their policies that means we're already set up and ready for when those changes happen. So if zillow announces next week we're now accepting commercial listings we could go ahead and we could easily make the changes to our platform so when that time comes commercial agents and brokers would easily be able to then go ahead and turn on Zillow syndication for their commercial listings. If you were to say listing a traditional home all these options would instead have the not applicable grayed out icon, they would have toggle switches like the ones we see here and again brevitas being that brand new commercial website that we saw earlier displaying the commercial listings coming from MyStateMLS .As we said before anything that's in a black field is completely optional, anything in red is a required field, we're just going to go ahead fill in the basic information that's needed just for demonstration purposes and move forward, because what I want to do is I want to show you the fields that are specific to commercial listings and some of that is right here where we've got commercial details. So if we're listing a business we could put the business there, we'll just put in a number of buildings, passenger elevators, there's one no freight elevators no loading docks, if we've got income and expenses for the property we can put that in here, see we've got all of our different expenses so we can add them out if we want to make this listing as complete as possible, utilities paid by the landlord are going to be the water and just the maintenance. 

 Dave: We've got basic information about the property this is where we're going to talk about when it was built, if there was any recent renovations, we say the storefront was completely rehabbed, if we want we've got our interior features of the property, it's hardwood, it's forced hot air with natural gas, there is central air. And now that we've done that we've got our exterior features, it's a brick building with a flat tar roof and this was the page I wanted everyone to see today. This is the unit information for this particular property, so again this is a commercial building and what this building is this has got a storefront on the ground floor then there's two apartments up top, so for unit type I'm going to go ahead we're going to click retail, it's one unit, it is 900 square feet and it is currently occupied, add another unit, so now we're going to go to the next floor, this is one residential unit, also 900 else is going to be 800 square feet, got the stairwell there, this is rented out for 1200, two bedrooms, one bath, we're going to add another unit, there's another apartment upstairs also 800, it's two bedrooms, one bath and this one is also occupied.Now that we've got that, we can talk about the building features so maybe there's laundry in the basement so we can go ahead check that off, there's an elevator, we know that there's an elevator, after we've done that we've got our marketing tech, so just like any traditional listing you're going to go ahead put in information about the property through your marketing text, I'm just going to go ahead and borrow from this.We want our marketing headline, put a marketing headline and the branded post fixed so you can put your information on it. So I can say for more info call dave @ 888-769-7657. Next is our private remarks to members of the MLS, so if you want you can go ahead and fill out this information this is gonna be what other members of MyStateMLS see so you could put in other things like 24 hours notice needed before showing, during business hours only, things like that during business hours on, then lastly is our virtual tour link and our youtube url link.  

 Dave: So it looks like this property in Louisiana they did a virtual tour. Let's see how they did it, so what they did is they actually use that virtual tour link to send the visitor directly to their company website for more information on how they can post a bid on this particular property and that's what sets these two different fields apart the virtual tour link is any type of url, so if you want it to go to your matterport or a dollhouse walkthrough on your website, you can use that, we always suggest is if you don't have a virtual tour but you've got the property listed on your commercial website or on a website, use that virtual tour link instead so that way you can potentially bring additional traffic to your website. The youtube url link is going to be specifically for youtube videos and what that's going to do is that's going to embed the youtube video directly into the listing as it appears on MyStateMLS. Next we have our tax and fee information, then lastly we can go ahead upload photos to the property, reorder the photos if we need to and add captions to our photos as well. Once we've done that the listing is pretty much good to go and ready to go live, because we did not upload any photos today we're just going to get the map view. If you do want to upload photos it's incredibly easy, let's go ahead and go back, so I don't think I have any commercial photos on my computer, so we'll just go ahead and we'll use some sample house pictures right now because I just want to show you exactly how easy it is to go ahead and upload photos to your listing and it's as simple as drag and drop, you saw me select all my photos, you saw me drag them in, I click start upload and now what that's going to do is it's going to upload all of my photos all at one time. We allow members to put up to 50 photos per listing and we allow you to send those in full screen high-res formats, in jpeg format, so that way once all of your photos are uploaded you can go ahead and put them in the order that you like best. If you wanted to add captions you could do that as well so that way once a potential buyer, another member sees your listing they're going to be able to scroll through all of those photos.  

 Wrap Up: 

 Dave: So that is how you quickly add a listing to MyStateMLS and with that said, if you're not a member of MyStateMLS just yet what are you waiting for? You can sign up at any time by visiting us at mystatemls.com, as I said before we have both monthly and yearly billing options with membership members being able to join at 40$ a month or 330$ for the full year, with monthly membership there's no long-term commitment you can cancel at any time, yearly billing saves you 150$ over that monthly rate by committing to the full year and then we also have office pricing as well which would allow you to give MLS memberships to all of your agents at a discounted bundled rate. So right now I just want to say thank you so much for joining me, if you have any questions about MyStateMLS, how it can be used for commercial real estate, maybe you're interested in signing up for that office pricing, feel free to give me a call @ 888-769-7657 or best yet you can get directly in my inbox at dave@mystatemls.com. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope to see you on MyStateMLS very soon and we'll see you in future webinars. Have a great day!