Portland MLS address mess
Portland MLS rules are out of the ordinary. As a member of the MLS we are restricted from showing any part of the address of homes for sale on Estately. We can map and show every detail in the world about nearly every property in the MLS, but addresses cannot be displayed. You can see the roofline in Google maps, the front of the house in the MLS image and in Google StreetView, the cross streets, and the lat-long, but you can’t see the address.
It’s reminiscent of Oregon’s approach to pumping gas – Oregon consumers are also not allowed to pump their own gas because, ostensibly, they might blow up the station and, in reality, to keep the supply of crappy jobs high. Our best guess is that the address rule is in place to prevent thieves from breaking into empty homes. This is a valid concern – vacant homes are broken into now and again – but the fact that a) you can see precisely where the home is on the map and b) most thieves use this web 0.0 thing called a car to quickly identify vacant homes with for sale signs in front of them makes it a little less valid. Additionally, the easiest way of identifying vacant homes is the private agent notes which identify which homes are vacant and those notes are not shown on the internet.
The real reason, like it or not, is probably to make it harder for consumers to get all of the information about properties on the market and to force them to seek out a professional before they need one.
And how can you, the consumer, make the most of it? You can still search by address or mls number. You can also hit the “send to friend” button on any property and email yourself the property or sign up to get emails for property updates; bizarrely MLS rules permit the emailing of addresses. You can also just read the cross streets off of Google maps. Barring those two routes, you can get a Realtor (via Estately’s Realtor recommendations if you don’t have a great agent already) and the agent can set you up with email updates or serve as your MLS number to address translator. Being an MLS number translator sounds worse than pumping gas to me.
