I’m trying to buy a home near Philadelphia (lower Bucks County) but I’m new to this game. What an experience, but that’s for another thread.
My question concerns MLS numbers. It seems realtors use an MLS number to uniquely identify each home for sale. I have several MLS numbers from sites like realtor.com and century21.com and would like to do a drive by on the homes that look good. Is there a way to match MLS numbers to an address so I can see these places in person? The sites that offer the listing generally don’t give you an address, just a vague map and neighborhood. I don’t want to have to wait for a realtor to get back to me with an address each time. So is there an easy way to do this? Do I HAVE to go through a realtor just to see the property from the street? Thanks in advance!
Hey Former Montgomery county (WIllow Grove) resident here.
The MLS #'s have nothing to do with the address and will not help you find it. They are numbers generated by the software. Take the vague map of the neighborhood. Realtor.com has an address if you click around the listing. If you are fairly familiar with the area they shouldn’t be hard to find as long as you are willing to drive around a bit. If you are unfamiliar with the area it will be trickier but still possible. You do not need an agent to look from the road. You could call a realtor and ask for directions saying you just want to look at the area and will contact them later if you are interested. Don’t give them your name or number. They will try to get you to make an appointment but stand firm and they should give you directions.
Ah, so the MLS isn’t really tied back to an address, interesting. I guess I’ll make some calls to the listed realtors. Its strange how realtor.com will get you 99% there but not list the actual address. If someone was trying to abuse the system its not enough to deter them, but it will discourage folks like me from visiting because of the hassle. Thanks for the info!
Well, it is, in the sense that every property is given a unique MLS number so it can be found in the database. But this is a “dumb” key, and you cannot extract any useful information about the property from the MLS number alone.
I believe you must be a Realtor to have access to the MLS database, and they try to protect this access to give Realtors and advantage of any ol’ schmo selling a house. Some websites will give you the address and some won’t, and sometimes it will depend on your market. I remember at least one website that wouldn’t give addresses, but would give mapquest-produced maps. You could click “Identify Icon” and mapquest would helpfully provide the address for you.
I do get addresses from my realtor’s listings but he hasn’t bothered to reply to my emails for 2 days now. I’d much rather do the searching myself than rely on his database searching skills, I can do a better job.
I have had good luck here: http://www.rmls.com. It might only available in Oregon as the front page indicates that it is designed for the Portland metro area, but I would imagine that there would be something comparable where you are.
On realtor.com, I’ve noticed that the address is included in the listing in California (the LA area, anyway), while in New Mexico, it isn’t. In fact, as noted, the maps here are obscured such that you only have a vauge idea where it might be located. It seems that such a practice is in the listing agents interest above the sellers interest. If I was selling a house, I think I’d insist that the address be included in the property description. It’s not a secret - this house is for sale. Why would a seller want to keep the location a secret?
I the Washington, DC area, discount broker ziprealtyprovides addresses for all MLS listings. Don’t know if zip covers your area or not, but I’m sure you can find a similar broker in your area.
If there is a website like realtor.com which shows the addresses I’m at a loss to find it. I’ve probably checked about a dozen, so far no addresses. I do get them when my realtor bothers to email me but then again he has access to a privlidged database of some kind.
I’m in week four of the new house. I had the same problem – here in Michigan the vast majority of listings had no address whatsoever. A few of the houses didn’t even have a location on a map! But for the ones with map locations, it gets you right into the neighborhood, as said. But the “extra trick” is to request driving directions. That will get you right to the house 99% of the time, even though it doesn’t show you the house number.
Here’s contributory – if anecdotal – evidence that addresses in Realtor.com do help. The house we ended up buying didn’t have an address, just like all the other houses. But it didn’t have a map, either! The house is tucked back in a neighborhood that you just won’t ever go into unless you know it exists. It was the only such like this that I bothered calling the Realtor for for the address, since the photo and specs were just great. To top it off, I had to leave a message and wait for them to get back to me!
Turns out the house was vacant for three years, on the market for one year, and due to, well, lack of anyone ever having driven by it we got it for much, much less than it’s worth (county has excellent, publically-available tax records online).
So in my case, the lack of information saved me thousands of dollars!
Depends on where your’re searching. For example, realtor.com listings in the New Orleans area are displayed with addresses but not the ones around here.
I have to mention that I did find an address on Realtor.com last night. I also tried navigating to the neighborhood on another promising home and was able to find it thanks to the “For Sale” signs outside. Its just silly not to post the address if you’re trying to sell a house, accomplishes nothing. If you are determined enough you’ll get it but its a completely unnecessary thing to withold the address from the website.
In the New Jersey MLS, the numbers are assigned by the order the listings are put into the system (I should know this, it’s part of my job to put my office’s listings in the system and on the Internet). Our own system uses the first two numbers to designate the year (2004 =24xxxxx). YMMV.
The addresses themselves are determined by the County’s tax codes. And the information is not on the listings put up for the public.
