Meet Sean Walls. Not only is he the consummate bargain shopper when it comes to real estate investing, he has started a really neat company to unite Realtors listings and Buyers via Twitter. It’s called Twitter MLS.com!

“I was sitting in Starbucks” — please note Sean gets a lot of inspiration from Sbux java — “looking at my cell phone, after I had purchased the $12,500 duplex and I thought, wow, what if we could use Twitter to get this information out to people?”

As an investor, Sean knows how rapidly buyers want fresh information on a property — reductions, contracts fallen through, REOs. That’s exactly how he found his own $12,500 bargain.

Twitter made perfect sense as a vehicle for getting real estate information out to consumers who are on the go, phone always in hand, maybe even looking at property. Sean hired a programmer who wrote up a code, popped some technology behind it, and Twitter MLS.com was born. Realtors use the system by pre-paying for a certain number of tweets — like a pre-paid phone card — and the cost is dirt cheap: ten cents per listing per post. You can post to any city — Sean has covered all the major cities in the U.S. and continues to add new ones daily. Europe is next. And you can post multiple times per day. That’s it. The realtor doesn’t even need a Twitter account or for that matter, know what it is or how it works. They go to the TwitterMLS.com website and follow the prompts, typing in the MLS number and link of all their listings and how many times they want the post to tweet. So when those tweets go out, anyone following TwitterMLS — not just those following the realtor — gets the tweets. And the latest deals.

So you ask: why can’t the Realtor do this themselves? Well, they can. Erin and Travis Mathews are twitting all over the place, because they are one of the first Real Estate teams in Dallas to understand how to use social media for real estate. I heard all about this two years ago at Inman — when I first learned what a Tweet was. The beauty of Twitter MLS is that it’s nationwide and has so many followers, often many more than a single Realtor ever could — 30,000 and multiplying as of this writing, and then there is the benefit for buyers: they only need to follow one feed per city, not one per realtor, they can see ALL the listings. And then there’s the layering: Realtors put out a listing, say a home that’s just been reduced. Twitter MLS followers pick up on it and re-tweet it to their followers. Within an hour you can have ten thousand eyes on a single listing.

“The way we buy and sell real estate is changing so rapidly,” says Walls, an Australian native. “87% percent of real estate sales transactions start on the Internet.”

But now, they could be starting on TwitterMLS.

Update: No monthly fee, I clarified with Sean.

Even if your mortgage has been sold, sold again and re-packaged as a mortgage-backed security, your name is on the note and you are responsible for the monthly payments no matter who it was assigned to. Know those stacks of papers you sign at closing? One of those docs gives your lender the right to assign the loan — or sell it — to whoever wants to pay the big bucks buy it. Miss one payment, you’ll find yourself embroiled in a lot of explanation and eterna-holds. (Wachovia calls me if one of our mortgage payments is two days late!) Miss several and your home could end up being sold on the court-house steps. Texas is a non-judicial foreclosure state, which means nothing has to be shown to a judge prior to launching the foreclosure process. This is one reason why Texas bankruptcy attorneys are busier than sin these days, working Saturdays and going to court to help homeowners save their homes.

But I need reader’s help with this one: is the mortgage holder, in this case none other than our esteemed Wick Allison, required to mail the payment (or send electronically) to the last known servicing address? Isn’t the bank required to notify all mortgage holders when a new loan assignment has taken place and specify where payments are to be mailed? What, if any, are the penalties against the mortgage holder for not doing so?

I recall an article in either the New York Times or Wall Street Journal a few months’ back describing the confusion all these loan re-assignments have caused in the foreclosure process. Folks were getting to court and no one could locate the actual mortgage documents. I’m trying to find the article.