The idea behind flat fee listing is sound, but here is something I hadn't considered before I learned it the hard & expensive way:
Especially in a hot market, the first few days your listing is in your local MLS are critical. Errors and omissions in the initial listing can really hurt you. Buyers who dismiss your listing because your square footage is understated, or because the listing agent posted the wrong photos, are not going to give it a second look after the corrections get made several days later - you've lost those prospects. So even if your house does sell quickly, you missed the opportunity to have multiple offers outbidding each other.
You saved a few thousand bucks with a flat fee listing, but left tens of thousands on the table because the flat fee broker didn't care enough to get material facts in your listing right. You would think that, since you have to fill online forms with the data, there would be a reliable process to transfer that data to the MLS listing. In my experience with mlssupport.com, they subcontracted the task, and the process of transcribing the data I entered onto the MLS listing was error-prone.
MLSsupport's subcontractor's typographical errors resulted in my square footage for the house being understated by 28 percent. My lot was understated by 900 sq. ft. Further, they substituted a single, older, unrevealing photo, harvested from a third-party site, for the six current and better photos that I had uploaded to their site.
MLSsupport was asleep at the wheel. Repeatedly, I sent them an email, clearly describing a problem (of their or their subcontractor's creation), and what I had already done in an attempt to resolve it. Invariably, they would quickly respond with a canned answer, telling me to do exactly what I had just told them I had already done to no avail, or addressing something different and unrelated, having nothing to do with the issue at hand. It was evident that they were just not even reading at my email, and responding with what amounted to a search-result from keywords. They literally used the reply button on one of my emails to request the exact thing that was in the email to which they were replying. I finally asked if I was conversing with a human or an algorithm.
Lastly, MLSsupport.com got snippy, and sent me a "you think you're so smart... I've been doing this since 2003" childish and unprofessional email in which they revealed that they are conducting this business via a smart phone instead of a computer. Though it suddenly made sense why they weren't able to open my .jpg attachments (or even figure out they were there), it was disappointing to see that amateur-hour just wasn't going to improve.
Like most other investors, I've encountered the stereotypical painter who wants to run his business with a cell phone from a barstool at the local tavern - it is completely hit-or-miss, reliability is a foreign concept, and his priorities are askew. That is the same thing I got from MLSsupport.com - at the beginning they were johnny-on-the-spot, answering quickly and saying all the right things, but after the money changed hands everything was different.
I didn't expect anything from MLSsupport.com except for my MLS listing to be posted, as promised, accurately, within 24 hours, with the 6 photos I supplied. They were 0 for 3, and then got nasty when I kept trying to resolve just the biggest item (i.e. getting photos posted) after having given up on the little stuff.
This is the third time I've used a flat fee MLS listing service. The company I used on the previous iteration to this one was the best, but they retired, so I went shopping. I advise folks to keep looking, rather than settling for MLSsupport.com. read more
