MLS Listing Photos
I’m reporting to you right from our hotel room in Bozeman, Montana. I do have coffee. I am a little bit upset that this coffee’s not all that good today, but it is one of those things that come to travel. Sometimes you get bonuses and sometimes you don’t. Today, I got a negative item here, but let’s go on and talk about listing photography and what we do with MLS and how we close that information out. So this information was brought up by an agent to us recently who request to get some information about it.
So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go over our policy and how it relates to non-disclosure, the fact that we’re in a nondisclosure state and what we’re going to do there, how we’re going to leave the first photo and how we’re going to remove the other ones and how this is really about privacy and safety. Right. And then the fact that we don’t put the final price. So we’ll go over that. And we’ll give you some alternative ways in which you can access the each listing assets if you would like to, after the sale have closed.
So if I’m to start back at the top, what happens is when we have a listing as a Questa real estate, any single listing we have. What we do is we want to do the absolute best that we can to represent that property, so we go out, we do all types of things for Media Day, whether we take photography, whether we take videography, we’ll do drones, we’ll do all types of things to get the property ready and we’ll have a Pre media Day and do all that will do the matter or we’ll do all these different items to show off the floor plan.
We’ll just so many countless items to show everybody exactly what the home is. OK, and the reason we do that is we want to get the highest and best possible price for our client because we truly, truly care. And all these things take a lot of time, energy, effort and a lot of collection, and then we take those and during our process we make a unique link for each individual, one of those assets, and we put that inside our CRM. So each one has an individual, external, sharable link that’s on our side in the system.
The whole idea is that we need to fill in every single button, every single item here on the listing. And once we have them all completed, then we’re able to go live. Now, we want to represent this property super well and have all the data there so everyone can make a truly informed decision. And we can have this be a great process for the seller. However, once that property goes under contract and it’s about to close and we have the final settlement statement, we have every single thing, all all the I’s are dotted and all the T’s are crossed and everything’s going to closing and we’re going to close here momentarily.
What we do is we take back we back everything off and we remove all the photos except the first one. We take down all those other assets right before we hit close out and sell and it’s finalized. What we do is we remove all those key data points. The reason for that is for safety of the individual who lives at the home. If you live there, you don’t want to have all your information publicly available to everybody.
So we take all that information down, with the exception of the one photo that shows what’s going on now. It’s about safety and it’s about non-disclosure. So you don’t want anyone else to be able to see inside these people’s homes or any one of those items. Now, if anyone wants that information later, we still have it. We still save all of it in our database. We never purge and we never get rid of it. So we have it. So if there’s a time later on that they need a photo for something or whatever that happens to be, you can take this external sharable link and you can send it out to them.
You can send the whole file in the whole folder, and then they’d have everything if they don’t want that. Right. But what they can’t do is reuse those photos for another purpose, the photos that we take or single use photography. And it’s for the intended use of marking the property for sale one time. We can’t take those photos, sell them, reuse them, license, whatever that happens to be, their single use or use them one time for each individual property.
Now, really, what it comes down to is nondisclosure and not putting that information out there. Right. Like you don’t want to have the internal pictures of your home. If someone was going to do you harm or rob you or like any one of those things, we don’t want to have that out there. So that’s why they’re removed. And this is our personal policy. Once we do that as a company and we take all that stuff down. Then when this syndicate’s out and we hit the button sell and it’s closed, then all of that information is now disappear.
So it’s not unreal, True.com, Zillow, Trulia, any one of those different websites. So it’s all totally remote. So I hope you fully understand exactly how that worked. I hope you understand the workaround that does come with it if you want to get that information afterwards. And now I hope you understand why. So we’re doing our absolute best there. What we also do is try not to share that price because we don’t want that affecting the taxes that the individual pays on their property.
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Mike Acquisto, Acquisto Real Estate , True.com, Zillow, Trulia
