One message driven home at the WinnipegREALTORS’® April photo shoot at CanWest Park was the power of a team working together for a common purpose. An impressive representation of the 1,300-member WinnipegREALTORS® team gathered to reinforce what it means to have a co-operative network of professionals committed to helping buyers and sellers successfully complete one of the most important investments of their lifetime.
As the pitch goes, when you put a property on MLS®, you are hiring an entire team of REALTORS® to go to work for you. Through the well-established and finely-honed Multiple Listing Service®, your property gets maximum exposure and the unparalleled benefit of having highly-trained real estate experts matching qualified buyers with available listings. The result is a large volume of sales in the least amount of time and inconvenience possible. While the REALTORS® team does not always bat 1,000, sales-to-listings conversions at 70 per cent have been extremely high in Winnipeg. And as for hits, the national website www.mls.ca gets up to 11 million a month.
The REALTOR® team has solid support behind it to ensure you reach home plate without any surprises. Buying and selling a home need not be a stressful experience. When you work with a REALTOR®, you have the security of knowing you have a trained and knowledgeable real estate professional at your side.
The MLS® is best described as a co-operative marketing system to ensure maximum exposure of properties for sale. Essentially, it is a central registry of properties used by REALTORS® to match buyers with properties for sale. When using MLS®, your REALTOR® quickly matches your needs with appropriate houses available on the market. Using MLS®, all 94,000 REALTORS® across the country have access to pertinent property information via computers and hand-held technological devices. No other system is capable of matching its comprehensive local coverage and its extensive inventory of available properties. MLS® is literally used 24/7 to benefit buyers and sellers.
An important part of MLS® that is sometimes overlooked is how rich it is as an historical database. As MLS® information is collected over time, a broader picture unfolds. A REALTOR® can determine price ranges by area and type of homes in diverse neighbourhoods. Variations in listing and selling prices can be determined, as well as which listings are expired or withdrawn. REALTORS use the MLS®’s extensive database to do comparable market analysis (CMAs) to provide a client with a true evaluation of what a property’s value should be worth based on current market conditions.
Beyond what a team of REALTORS® does by working in co-operation to help buyers and sellers, the local real estate boards or associations through the MLS® systems they operate, are able to store and maintain a significant battery of information to help planners, economists, researchers, government, industry and the media understand what is happening in the housing market. After all, housing today is seen as one of the leading barometers of the economy.
The WinnipegREALTORS’® team in April and May had back-to-back record dollar volume months. May was the all-time best dollar volume month in the association’s 105-year history. May recorded over $300 million in sales for the first time and set the stage for the fastest time WinnipegREALTORS® reached $1 billion in its history — it took just under five months to reach this historic record. Only six years ago, it would take 12 months to reach the $1-billion level.
Sales were also impressive. April sales were the best ever for the month and May sales resulted in the second best month of all time, a runner-up to May 2007, when MLS® sales eclipsed the 1,600 level.
The average days a home sold in May was less than three weeks, and 67 per cent of the homes sold at or above list price. The sale price of all homes sold on MLS® in April and May averaged six per cent above list price.
There was a welcomed increase in new listings in April and May with more than 4,000 entered on MLS®. On Monday, June 2, 230 homes were listed in just one day.
During the two months, four homes sold for over $1 million, and more homes than ever before sold above $300,000.
When buying or selling, it pays to enlist the help of the WinnipegREALTORS® team.