The Valley Board of Realtors is about to make a momentous decision on August 11, 2007. The question will be whether to drop our Valley MLS system and join with Anchorage or not. It appears that the vote will be to merge the two systems.
Currently almost all real estate companies in the Mat-Su Valley are members of both the Alaska MLS and the Valley MLS. They input all their listings on both systems. The Valley MLS system has a public website here… www.matsumls.com . And Alaska MLS also has a public website here… www.alaskarealestate.com .
The matsumls.com website will go away but the Alaska MLS website will remain. It already has all the listings for the Kenai Peninsula, so it will be the go-to site for all of South Central Alaska.
The primary reason that the Valley Realtors want to do this is to save time and money. It takes extra time to input listings into both systems. It costs money to belong to both systems.
I’m not sure how this will affect the public. It may be a good thing because one site will provide complete coverage for the whole area.
Currently, matsumls.com seems to be a much faster site. With just a couple clicks you can almost instantaneously find all the residential listings in the Valley. It takes alaskarealestate.com much longer to find them, and then it is much slower to browse through them, BUT, the site has more detail for each listing.
Stay tuned, I will report on the results after the Valley Board or Realtors Convention on August 11.
