Zillow is primarily an advertising company, meaning it displays properties for sale to attract a large consumer audience. Some of these people are active buyers, some are just casual browsers.

The Multiple Listing Service, on the other hand, is the platform virtually all real estate agents in the market working with serious, active buyers, rely on to serve those buyers.

The MLS is also how agents representing buyers get information on how to show buyers homes for sale outside of open house times. These “showings” are done under rules the Big Sky Country Multiple Listing Service sets to ensure safety and privacy.

There are lots of home valuation tools online, but these all produce ballpark figures based on data scraped together from sometimes spotty sources.

For the most accurate and up-to-date home value, there’s simply no substitute for the expertise of a real estate agent who’s In The Know®. Your agent has access to decades of data through their MLS, which tracks every detail of home listings and sales over the past several decades. That means they can make suggestions based on historical data and current market patterns.

Once your agent lists your home on the MLS, it’s on display for every agent working with an active buyer. Agents can search based on square footage, beds/baths, acreage, and more.

Yes. Open house information is stored and shared between agents on the MLS. Buyers’ agents can search and share open houses with their clients, so long as the information has been uploaded onto the MLS by the listing agent.

While there is no national MLS, nearly all 600 local Multiple Listing Services across the United States are committed to the same set of rules around how they formulate and use their data.

This makes it easy to send your listing to nearly every destination online across the country and around the world.

Yes. While some data on the MLS can be accessed by the public, private information like whether or not the home is vacant, times of day available for walk-throughs, and entry information are kept private, and only accessible by registered real estate agents/members of the Multiple Listing Service.