Vallarta MLS celebrates 20 years of Service

John Youden
Val­larta Lifestyles
Mex­mags Pub­lish­ing Group

This year marks twenty years that Multi-List Val­larta has been pro­vid­ing MLS (Mul­ti­ple List­ing Ser­vice) to the Puerto Val­larta region. We believe that makes it the longest run­ning MLS in Mex­ico, and also the first. Its gone from being just a photo-copied book (well, actu­ally we still offer that ser­vice), to being avail­able online at mul­ti­ple web­sites. There’s an member’s only sec­tion where Real­tors can ser­vice their list­ings and gen­er­ate reports.

Multi-List Val­larta is dif­fer­ent from other MLS ser­vices in that it is pri­vately owned, rather than owned and oper­ated by the local real estate asso­ci­a­tion. When we first started (we as in two guys in an extra room in an apart­ment down­town) we approached AMPI, the local real estate chap­ter, and asked if we could pro­vide them MLS ser­vice. They turned down the offer, stat­ing that they wanted to do their own. Three years later they approached us about pro­vid­ing exclu­sive ser­vice for them as they hadn’t man­aged to get a sys­tem together for their orga­ni­za­tion. It meant that we had to then exclude clients that we had that we not AMPI mem­bers, but we did it (well, I did it – we were down to one guy in an extra room in an apart­ment – but now in the marina), believ­ing that a strong real estate asso­ci­a­tion would be good for the indus­try. It was done on a hand­shake, as it stands today, and although there’s been a num­ber of ups and downs, the rela­tion­ship remains a good one.  There is no real estate licens­ing in Mex­ico so the real estate asso­ci­a­tions have to take up polic­ing their indus­try on their own. With a strong MLS, they can threaten expul­sion from the MLS ser­vice for Real­tors that pro­vide bad ser­vice to their clients or other Real­tors. And they have used that power, although infrequently.

Multi-List Val­larta is the only pri­vately orga­nized MLS in Mex­ico and I don’t believe there are many in the USA or Canada. Actu­ally, there aren’t many MLS ser­vices in Mex­ico and those that do exist are weak. We’ve been asked numer­ous times to pro­vide ser­vice for regions such as Can­cun, Los Cabos and San Miguel de Allende, but pre­ferred to con­cen­trate on the Val­larta mar­ket. Actu­ally, that’s not true, we did pro­vide MLS ser­vice to the Los Cabos region in the early 90s, but found the dis­tance dif­fi­cult and handed it back to the board. They actu­ally still are using the logo we designed, which is very sim­i­lar to Vallarta’s.

Are there ben­e­fits to have a pri­vate MLS?

I believe there are. For one, it took a lot of time and ded­i­ca­tion, espe­cially in the early years, to get it up and run­ning. You need some­one who is will­ing to ded­i­cate that time and profit it a good motive. Unless the real estate asso­ci­a­tion is will­ing to hire and pay good peo­ple, it just won’t hap­pen. It may look like there is money to be made for the asso­ci­a­tion, which oth­er­wise is going else­where, but if we didn’t sub­si­dize our MLS ser­vice hav­ing staff that also pro­duce our print pub­li­ca­tions and web­sites, it would not be prof­itable or worth doing. And there has also been the con­cern with the mem­bers of the ser­vice get­ting into the hands of a pres­i­dent or board who may abuse their access to the infor­ma­tion. We don’t sell real estate and aren’t active in the mar­ket in any­way. There­fore we can remain impar­tial and objective.

I guess the best test is just to look at other mar­kets in Mex­ico and see how effi­cient their sys­tems are when oper­ated by their real estate association.

http://vallartarealestate.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/vallarta-mls-celebrates-20-years-of-service/