Offers of Compensation are No Longer Allowed in the MLS

The recent NAR ruling restricts the display of buyer’s compensations in the MLS. Agents can no longer offer any sort of compensation in the MLS. What’s more, you can’t really offer it anywhere else either. Posting offers of compensation on a third-party site could put you at risk of removal from your MLS. The only place where a listing agent can offer compensation is either through direct communication or on the agent’s own website. Wondering how to show buyer’s compensation on your website? In this post, we’ll show you how.

Can You Show Buyer’s Compensation on Your Website?

Yes, you can! You can even add buyer’s compensation to your website using an IDX feed. Take a look at FAQ #46 from the NAR FAQS.

Why This is a Problem

This limitation creates a challenge for real estate agents and brokers who want to sell their client’s listings as quickly as possible by offering buyer’s agent commissions or compensation. Without an efficient solution, real estate agents and brokers risk losing out on potential buyers. And communicating this information to each interested buyer’s agent individually could mean an tremendous amount of calls, emails, and text messages.

You need a straightforward and intuitive way to add buyer’s compensation information to your listings directly from the MLS. The good news is, with VistaWP, it’s quite easy and intuitive to add these remarks to your listings in the MLS feed.

Introducing the Buyer’s Compensation Feature on VistaWP

This simple and intuitive feature empowers you to effortlessly include buyer’s compensation details on your listings, directly on your website, ensuring you never miss out on attracting potential buyers (and your phone doesn’t blow up with calls, emails, and texts.)

By utilizing the Buyer’s Compensation Feature on VistaWP, you can differentiate yourself from competitors by prominently displaying buyer’s compensations.

Remember to check the specific guidelines provided by your MLS to ensure compliance and take advantage of this valuable feature on VistaWP today.

What is VistaWP?

Glad you asked. VistaWP is a new website builder specifically for real estate agents and brokers. It harnesses the power of WordPress and the best tools available to provide a fully customizable real estate website at a fraction of the cost. If you’re not using VistaWP yet for your real estate website, schedule a demo.

How to Show Buyer’s Compensation on Your Website

Video Transcript

Hey, Roger here with VistaWP. Uh, we’ve been getting a couple of requests to be able to show uh, something called seller concessions, uh, for your listings on your website.

So, the way we understand it is after the NAR ruling, no longer will commissions be available in the MLS, and they can’t really be on another third -party, uh, aggregator type website either.

So, the best way to communicate any seller concessions is is, uh, on your website. So, you know, buyer’s agents could reach out to you if you have a, if you have a listing.

Buyer’s agents could reach out to you and blow up your phone and send you text messages and emails about particular listings or you could show them on your website.

And it is possible to actually have your listings from the MLS, uh, on your website and add the seller seller concessions to those.

with VistaWP. So VistaWP is a website platform for real estate websites. It has integrated IDX, um,

feeds so you can show your MLS listings and a whole host of other features. If you haven’t seen it before or you are not on it, reach out to us and, uh, schedule a demo.

Well, we’d love to show it to you. So, in the meantime, let me show you how this feature works.

So, this is a test site here, and this is a listing, um, let’s say that we go to all of our listings,

and again, these are all coming in from a test MLS, so these are all fake listings.

So, a test MLS, and if we look at any of these, and we’ll show us the information for this particular property, property, and with VistaWP, you can…

totally customize all of this design and font and everything like that now

Right now I’m logged into the website. Let’s look at the website as if I’m not logged in.

So I’m just a normal user Okay, and I click on this one here I’m gonna see this little spot down here that says seller concessions and it says no seller concession information is available So we can actually control this this isn’t pulling in from the

MLS It’s actually from your particular website. So if I’m logged into the website, um, I am going to see the same listing, but now I have this little form here.

So this would be for, like, let’s say your agents. You want them to be able to log into the website and add their own seller concessions for each listing.

Because it might change from house to house. So you need to be able to do it for each individual listing.

The best way for them to do that is to log into the website and actually just go to the listing and they’ll have this little form here.

So we’re going to say test seller concessions and we’ll say 1 .5%. Okay. We’re going to hit submit.

And that’s going to get saved. And now if I go back here to the public facing listing one, so I’m not logged in.

I’m going to hit refresh. and

if I scroll down to the bottom, now I see the concessions for this particular listing.

So it’s a super simple way to add, um, any buyers concessions available or seller concessions.

You can’t actually offer a commission per se, but the seller can offer, um, a certain amount that can be used towards closing costs, which could potentially pay the buyer’s agent.

Um, and you can’t communicate that in the MLS anymore. You can’t necessarily put it on a third -party website, um, and you can’t really be throwing it around on social media.

The only way that you can communicate this via the new NAR rulings is actually on your own personal website.

So this is the best and easiest way, um, and pretty intuitive to allow your agent. to log in and add this information.

Again, this isn’t going to the MLS. All of, all of this data is coming from the MLS, but this lives on your website and it’s controlled by your agents, logged into your website, adding it on an individual listing basis.

There’s one caveat. Um, this is, it’s, it’s, this feature is going to show for any listing listing coming in from the MLS.

You should really, only be adding this to your listings But that’s pretty obvious. You just need to make sure that you’re only adding it to your listings

Okay, hope that’s helpful. Again, the name of our, of our website builder is VistaWP We’d love to get you set up on a killer real estate website with IDX feeds.

If you haven’t seen it, reach out and We’ll schedule a demo and I’ll show you how it works.

Thanks

– Roger Rowles, VistaWP Founder