World's First Wiki MLS Definition and Disclosure.

As always, everything dealing with real estate is full of disclosures.

First of all, the "MLS" stands for "Multiple Listing Service." See Wikipedia definition for MLS.

Briefly, it is a cooperative amongst brokerage firms to pool all listings from all licensed real estate agents (not just REALTORS). Those brokers then use an "IDX" feed from the raw MLS to redisplay some of that data on their website. (oftentimes with their logo on each page, making it look like THEY are listing each property, and in the fine print it says "Listing courtesy of" the actual listing company)

Consumers do NOT technically have DIRECT accessto the MLS itself. Why? Well out of the 650 fields, there are about 5 that are blocked including: Realtor Remarks (vs Internet Remarks that you see), Owner's name & phone number, Showing Instructions (ie call first, or have cat, or "after 12"), and the buyer agent offered commission.

Also maybe 5 in 60,000 listings locally are for some reason or another (by request) NOT be published on public websites.

So FranklyMLS.com is NOT "The MLS" is it 99.99% of the MLS.

Why all the silly disclosure? Well some higher ups are starting to mandate that we can't use the word MLS since it is "misleading." Do you feel mislead? But now that I have disclosed everything, so we should be ok. Also the Realtor Magazine even recommended that Realtors use MLS in their domain (see article), and they don't have it trademarked, and if they stop us from using "MLS," that means Non-Realtors CAN still use MLS in their advertising. See FreeTheMLS.com for more details.

As for exactly what the WIKI part is all about, read this blog post that explains all the features of this site: http://activerain.com/blogsview/459182/FranklyMLS-com-Launch-World

Thanks, and don't forget the feedback.

Frank Borges LLosa- Founder, Owner FranklyMLS.com