There’s been a lot of talk on Zillow’s new Coming Soon feature. Hell, even Wurzer brushed off his blogging keyboard and had an opinion. Inman News characterized it as “pocket listings on steroids“.
“Agents can manually upload their coming soon homes to Zillow while brokerages and MLSs can opt in by adding a “Coming Soon” field to their current feeds or building out a separate, new feed dedicated to coming soon listings. Agents can renew a coming soon listing for up to 30 additional days.
The feature allows a listing to land on the MLS with a “ton of velocity” with buyers dreaming home-specific dreams and ready with preapproval letters from lenders, Zillow Chief Revenue Officer Greg Schwartz told Inman News.”
Meh.
While I think its a clever idea, and one that MLS providers should look at implementing, I don’t think its really going to matter in the long run. Pocket Listings are driven by low inventory. Once the market settles, and inventory comes back to normal inventory levels, pocket listings will go away like bell bottom jeans. That doesn’t mean they won’t be back again, but its hard for me to understand what all the excitement is about.
Still don’t understand why everyone thinks MLSs should jump and start including Coming Soon listings in their databases. The reason these exist is because the agent/broker doesn’t want them in the MLS so why should we accommodate them. Besides in most MLSs these types of listings would violate rules because they are not backed by a valid listing agreement.
And if we did add them, guess what. We would then have pre-Coming Soon listings out there.
I don’t have time to deal with this – I am busy figuring out how to get FSBOs on the MLS. 🙂