Shake says: Yesterday, 12:10:00 AM

fedwatcher says: Yesterday, 1:35:35 AM

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.

“Who is responsible for realtor fees?  I was thinking that your advice would be very helpful.   Please help.
I really appreciate your help.”

The buyer of the property really pays for the realtors’ fees in the price of the home. At closing, commissions are taken off the sales price of the home and the seller is funded whatever remains. Sellers in Texas traditionally pay for Title policies, but this is not set in stone. The traditional split is 3% to the buyers agent, 3% to the seller’s agent. How they split the 3% within the brokerage firm is up to the agent and broker to battle out, and splits do vary. The broker usually owns the listings. Correct me if I am wrong. The answer is, I guess, the buyer of the property unless the seller… or a Fairy Godmother… decides to pick up the tab.

Hope this helps. Thanks for asking.

Update: My experts concur, I was wrong: Seller pays.