Over the past year since the launch of the Super Regional MLS, SFARMLS has analyzed the health of the Coming Soon ecosystem to determine uses of this pre-market status.
Using stats from 2021, we observed that about 1 in 4 SFARMLS listings first go through Coming Soon status for an average period of 2 weeks. We believe this supports the hypothesis that the Coming Soon status is a valid way that many members use to test different prices before presenting their listing to the public.
Figure 1: Coming Soon listings constitute a reasonable proportion of listing activity in the MLS.
The analysis was extended into an examination of the statuses Coming Soon listings go through once they move out of the Coming Soon status. We often hear anecdotal observations that "Coming Soon listings are always canceled or removed" and wanted to understand if that was true.
We discovered that 95% of Coming Soon listings move into an Active status after their time in pre-market, with only 2% moving directly into the Sold Off MLS status. We do see that in 3% of cases, a Coming Soon listing moves directly to Canceled. Of those that go into Active status after Coming Soon, 82% follow the normal listing lifecycle using statuses Pending and Contingent.
Figure 2: Of all outbound statuses from Coming Soon, 95% are Active. 82% follow the normal listing lifecycle.
Our results show an overwhelmingly positive result of member use of the status, the bottom line being that the majority of these listings eventually become publicly visible throughout their listing lifecycle.
These results tell us something important: that the intended use of Coming Soon is in line with the goal of eventually listing their properties publicly and not to abuse Coming Soon purely for off-MLS marketing. We realize that some abusive uses do exist, and we continue to look at ways of curtailing those behaviors. As SFARMLS moves forward with improvements to data integrity in the coming year, members should have confidence that violations of Clear Cooperation are fast becoming the exception, and certainly not the norm.
Patrick Anderson is the MLS Technical Lead at SFAR. He, along with SFAR's Financial Analyst Camilo Durango, developed the analysis in this report.
For questions about Coming Soon status, please reach out to SFAR's MLS Support Team by clicking "New Support Ticket" at the top of this page, by emailing them at mls@sfrealtors.com, or by creating a ticket from the SFARMLS Home Dashboard.
For compliance and data integrity concerns, please reach out to RJ Johnson, SFAR's Compliance Officer, at compliance@sfrealtors.com, or by using the "Report Violation" tool in the MLS.