Are You Keeping Home Sold Price Records?

When you want to look up some home sold prices for comps or other purposes, it's fast and easy to go to the MLS and get them. Do you know how long your MLS database keeps home sold prices where you can access them? Many remove them after five years, but check your MLS rules or ask, as it's important information.

Whether you've checked or not, virtually everyone at some time or another wants information about home sold prices, and serious buyers and investors want long-term price appreciation information as well. The key here is "long-term." If your MLS is purging sold records after five years, that's all the reliable historical data available. There must be some value in having older sold price information, and you can build your own database easily.

Start Building Your Reports

What you want is an easy way to capture and store your MLS sold property reports on a regular basis. As time moves along, and it does so faster than we like in some cases, you consistently build your reports and store them away for use later in your marketing and client services.

Action: PDF Them for Later

There are a great many free and very low-cost software and online solutions to create PDF files. As this format is readable by more than 98 percent of computers around the world, it's a fast and easy way to get the job done by "printing to PDF." You're going to store them away and once you've gone past the storage limits of the MLS, you're sitting on gold when it comes to market information.

Organize Your Results

From the beginning, you want to organize your data such that you can use it later in various ways and over various time periods. Sure, you can use spreadsheets, requiring more time to get the data from the MLS into your sheets, and then even more time later to get it from your sheets to shareable formats. That's why PDF is better if it's done right.

Action: Be Regular and Segregate

The more often you create your reports, the closer you can drill down in time later for custom reporting of sold prices and calculating appreciation. Monthly is great, but quarterly works well for most of us. Quarterly reporting gets the seasons, as seasonal markets should be recorded by season. Monthly really lets you get to the data, and you'll find that the reports recommended here take around 10 minutes to produce and save, so why not?

Different MLS systems will generate reports in differing formats, but you should be able to get a sold price report for homes sold in neighborhoods or MLS areas. Later, you'll be able to compare sold prices by area with this report, as well as by property type.

This report is for residential homes by price range. This is great information, but remember that as prices appreciate, the homes in a price range line will be different homes, as they're moving up in the ranges over time. However, this report does help to show time on market before sale for different price ranges, so it's a great resource for the past year or so when you're talking to a listing prospect.

Using Your Reports

PDF files can be combined, cut up into pieces, annotated with notes, and more. You'll need software for that, but it is inexpensive, with 15 reviews here. Arriving at a listing or buyer appointment with a report with your notes on it that fits their information needs is impressive. Other uses:

Short Term

Offer reports of recent sales via email for lead generation. Choose a period, from the previous month to the previous quarter or year.

Older Sales No Longer in MLS

Lead generation offering reports via over multi-year periods for appreciation by MLS area.

Year-by-Year

Offer investor information reports with top price appreciation areas over time.

Comprehensive

For the really analytical prospect, offer multi-year all-inclusive reports for the market area. Ask questions in the form about their needs for the information so that you can make notes on the report and call out information that's important.

There are many ways you can use these home sold and other reports in person and as lead generators offered on your website.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.