How To Get MLS Access WITHOUT A License!

You've heard me say it before: The MLS is the king database of leads in your market. It's where the majority of real estate transactions occur every single year. In fact, the National Association of Realtors has stated that 90% of all real estate transactions happen on the MLS. And so that's why it's extremely important that you fish in a huge, entire blue ocean of real estate deals rather than trying to focus on the off-market, red ocean deals and just be a little pawn in a little sea.

So in today's video, we're going to cover how to get access to the MLS without a real estate license, so you have access to the blue ocean of distress leads. And for those of you that don't know, we've been wholesaling, fixing & flipping, buying & holding real estate from the MLS for the last decade, and we have hundreds of clients doing the same across the United States. So we know a thing or two about the MLS and getting access to it.

So in today's video, I'll cover exactly what the MLS is, so you know exactly what it is. Then I'll cover why it's important, and I'll give you five reasons why, as a wholesaler and real estate investor, you need access to the MLS. And number three, I'll cover actually three ways on how to get access to the MLS without a real estate license. So you can have instant access to all these deals on the market, start wholesaling, fixing & flipping, even buying & holding them.

So first off, what is the MLS? Well, the MLS stands for the Multiple Listing Service. Here at Real Estate Skills, we like to refer to it as the multiple lead service because what it is, it's a database of all the leads on the market in your specific area. Now, what I want you to know is that there isn't just one MLS that has all the leads on the market in the nation. There's actually over 600 MLSs, private MLSs in different counties and cities across the United States. And that is what you want to get access to if you're a real estate investor, if you're a wholesaler looking to get deals.

So the MLS is comprised of photos of properties, actual descriptions of properties. An agent will go in there and type in what's going on with this property: Is it a diamond in the rough? Does it need a lot of work? Or is it a brand new property? They'll type in their description; they'll even have confidential remarks saying, like, "What's really going on with the property?" These confidential remarks—it's not public information. On the MLS, this information—it's not going to be on Redfin or Zillow or in the public. So you get a lot of extra data, a lot of extra information on the MLS that you wouldn't get on something like zillow.com, for example. Now we like to say the deals are in the data, and when you have more data, you can make better decisions, you can negotiate deals at a better price, and that's what the MLS gives you. So it's got the descriptions, it's got photos of the property. A lot of MLSs have like 25 photos on there. So you don't even have to actually drive to the property, go check it out. You can look at 25 photos of the inside and outside that the agents upload to the MLS, so you get a pretty good idea of what's going on with that property.

Now, what's also really cool about the MLS: the contact information of the person in charge of the deal is on the MLS. So the real estate agent, the listing agent, their name, their email, and their phone number is on the MLS. So you can go straight to these agents on the MLS, call them directly today and talk to them about this deal they put on the MLS.

Now, every single day on the MLS in your market, there are brand new properties that are completely renovated, being updated and uploaded to the MLS. But what you need to understand too, if you're a real estate investor and wholesaler, there are also distress leads being uploaded every single day, distressed houses, and these are the houses that you want to go after. You want to go after the properties that are distressed, in distress condition, where the sellers are in a distress situation, because those properties need to go all cash. And as a wholesaler, as a fixer and flipper, these are the properties you're going to be able to get below market value and at a discount. Just because properties are on the MLS doesn't mean it's going to sell at market value. If a distressed house is on the MLS and it needs to go all cash, and the seller has a lot of motivation to sell, it's most likely going to sell for below market value. And that's a big reason why getting access to the MLS is so important. So you have access to these distressed deals, these distressed leads; you can call in every single day and work on getting under contract for your business.

So it's important to understand that there are hundreds of MLSs across the United States, and there's one specifically for your market and for your region. Okay? So getting MLS access in Austin, Texas is not going to help you if you're located in San Francisco, California. Those are going to be two completely different MLSs. So I want you to understand that because people think that they just need to go to MLS.com, which isn't the MLS, and sign up for that, and they have access to the MLS. It's not what it is. The MLS is a private network, a private database that's used and maintained by real estate professionals in your market.

And that's why I'm excited to share this video today, because 10 years ago when I started and I did my first wholesale deal for $22,000 from the MLS, I wasn't licensed, but I had access to the MLS. And so I'm going to teach you the same strategies I've used and my students use to get access to the MLS so you have access to all these deals that you can wholesale, fix and flip, and buy and hold.

Now, I want to cover the five reasons why you want access to the MLS if you're a wholesaler and real estate investor. All right, reason number one: having access to the MLS as a wholesaler and real estate investor allows you to be on the offense. Now, what I mean by this is a lot of real estate investors who don't use the MLS, they're on the defense, meaning they're waiting for leads to come into them. They're putting out bandit signs on the side of the road; they're sending 10,000 mailers, and they go home, they cross their fingers, they hope for the phone to ring; they hope someone calls their sign or sees their mailer and gives them a call. Now, that call that comes in, it can be from anywhere. It can be very random. So you're on the defense waiting for these deals to come in. On the MLS, you can be on the offense. You can go after deals every single day. You do not have to wait for someone to call you to be able to submit an offer on a property. And we like to say that the more offers you send, the more deals you're going to get. So when you use the MLS, you can control the amount of offers you send every single day. It's really about how many agents do you want to talk to and call on to be able to get a deal, so you can be on the offense. Your business, the amount of money you make, is never dictated by how many people call you. The amount of money that you make is dictated by how many deals are you going to call on the MLS and how many offers are you going to send? I personally, and my students, we like to be in control of our businesses. We like to understand that it is up to us for our business to succeed. We're not relying on someone else to call us with the deal. So the MLS allows you to be on the offense and go exactly after the deals that you want and your cash buyers want.

Now, reason two on why having access to the MLS is so important: it's because the MLS is the least expensive way to get deals besides getting deals for free. Most ways to get deals require you to pay for marketing. Send the mailers, 10,000 pieces of mail; that's probably going to cost anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000, or let me hire a cold calling team to call on all these deals. You got to pay people salaries or pay them hourly; you got to pay them commission. It costs money to do that. Now, the MLS, it's either going to be free for you or very inexpensive. And so when you look at the amount it costs to acquire a deal, you're going to see it's drastically reduced or it's drastically smaller than any other way of being able to get the deal. And what's important to understand about the MLS is that we don't make cold calls to real estate agents. It's really important you understand this. We are not making cold calls. These agents who put a house for sale that's distressed on the MLS, they want you to call them. Why is this? Because an agent only gets paid when a deal closes. So you can call an agent and say, "Hey, I'm a buyer. I'm interested in this property. Are you open to doing business together?" They're going to say, "Yes. What can I tell you about the property?" Because that's their job. That's why they're hired. Because an agent gets paid through commission on a deal. That's why they get paid when the deal closes. They typically get paid anywhere from 2.5% to 3% of the sales price of the home. So you need to understand that, that you're not making a cold call. And when you call the agent from a random phone number, know that they're most likely going to pick up and know it's their job to pick up and talk about real estate and know that we're not convincing a seller to sell their house, and we're not convincing a real estate agent to sell a house. They're already convinced they want to sell the house. It's just, are you going to give them the right offer that they want to take for this particular property? And that's where building rapport with agents is very important. You can't be an a-hole talking to real estate agents. You got to picture and imagine, how can I call this agent and make their day better each and every day. When they see you calling, they say, "Hey, it's Alex calling. Man, I can't wait to pick up this phone call. He's going to ask me about my day, He's going to ask me about my kids, and then he is going to talk about real estate." That's what we need to do. We need to be able to have these relationships with agents, each and every agent as much as possible through building rapport with them. And a lot of times, that can be the reason why you get a deal versus another real estate investor. You could have an offer at the same exact price, but if an agent who's in charge of the deal likes you more and the offers are at the same price, who do you think the agent's going to go with? The person they like more. So building rapport with agents is very important in understanding that these are not cold calls. These are warm and hot phone calls. Just another big reason on why you want access to the MLS.

Now, reason number three: you have direct access to all the deals on the market in your area. Nothing else needs to be said for this reason. It makes a lot of sense, right?

And reason four: having MLS access allows direct, streamlined communication to the listing agent, the most important person in this deal besides the seller. So a lot of real estate investors and wholesalers think that when you're wholesaling or buying houses on the market, that you have to use another buyer's agent who's not the listing agent to close a deal. That's not the case. When you have access to the MLS, you can contact that listing agent directly because you have their name, you have their phone number, you have their email, you may even have their address as well. You can contact them; you can do whatever it takes to get in front of that real estate agent to be able to work with them. And you don't need a buyer's agent. We cut out a middleman, we cut out a person from the deal, and that allows for nothing to get lost in translation. If you want to talk offer price and negotiate the price on this deal, talk directly to the listing agent. That's the person we need to talk to. You don't talk to a buyer's agent, and that buyer's agent talks to the listing agent. The listing agent talks to the buyer's agent then gets back to you. This buyer's agent isn't the owner of your business. Who's going to fight more for a deal? Who's going to work harder on a deal? Who's going to negotiate harder on a deal? You or your buyer's agent? I would choose me. I would choose you every single day to talk to the listing agent so you can fight for the deal and do what you need to do to be able to get this deal under contract. And the MLS allows you to have direct access, direct communication to that listing agent so you have the most successful business possible, get the most deals under contract and close the most deals.

And reason number five: having access to the MLS gives you access to hundreds, if not thousands, of real estate agents that you can do deals with. When you're a pro in this game, when you're a pro at wholesaling or fixing & flipping houses from the MLS, your goal isn't just to work with one agent. Today in your market, there could be 10 new distressed leads that are uploaded that are going to go to an investor with 10 different real estate agents. And you can build relationships with these 10 different real estate agents. You can have the chance to put these 10 different deals under contract. But guess what? Those 10 agents who have a distressed house today on the market, that you may get one of those deals under contract with, these agents, they're doing something right to get distressed houses under contract, to get distressed houses that they put on the market for sale. So chances are, in a month, two months, or three months, if you build a relationship with these agents, in a few months, they're going to have another deal that's distressed because they're doing their own marketing. They're doing their own networking. So the MLS gives you access to all of these agents who are in the trenches every single day. And I like to look at it like you're building an army of real estate agents that work for you, that get deals under contract for you. And the better relationship you have with them, the more deals you're going to get, and the MLS gives you access to all of these real estate agents.

Now, let's get into how to get MLS access without a real estate license. The three words I want you to remember are MLS Assistant Access. This is a type of MLS access for unlicensed individuals. Typically, these are assistants, someone helping out real estate agents or real estate brokers, and it's a type of access; you get your own username, your own password to the MLS in your area, but you just don't have some certain functions that a normal real estate agent or broker would have on the MLS. For example, you can put properties for sale in the MLS. That's part of their job. But if you have MLS Assistant Access, that isn't something you can do, nor is it something you want to do, because as a wholesaler, as a real estate investor, you want to use the MLS to find distressed houses, to be able to go straight to the source, the king source of deals on the market.

Now, one thing I do want you to know is that MLS Assistant Access can have a few different names. It could be called Office Assistant Access. It could be called Just Assistant Access, Unlicensed Access, Administrative Access. So know there are multiple names for what this is. Just know it's like a lower-tiered version of the MLS that just doesn't allow you to post properties for sale, but allows you to have access to all the other data on the MLS, which is what you want.

All right, let's get into how to get MLS access without a real estate license by going into our first approach that we like to use, and it's called the existing network approach. What you want to do here is think about any friends, family members, relatives, anyone that you know who's a real estate agent, because these can be great real estate agents to approach. It's already a warm conversation or a warm relationship. And these are the people you can approach and let them know that, "Hey, I'm a real estate investor, and I'm looking to get MLS Assistant Access so that I can go ahead and submit offers on certain particular deals." And what's important to understand is that you need to think WIIFT—W-I-I-F-T—What's In It For Them? You can't just ask that right off the bat without understanding how real estate agents are incentivized. You have to let them know that you can make them more money when they give you MLS Assistant Access. Otherwise, there's no other reason for them to give you MLS Assistant Access. So anything about how do real estate agents make money? Well, number one, they make money through representing sellers who want to sell their house on the MLS, but they also make money by representing buyers who want to buy houses. Our goal when we wholesale houses from the MLS is to, yes, have direct, streamlined communication to the listing agents. But what about when a listing agent just doesn't want to work with us, and we still want to get an offer in? Well, in that case, that listing agent will not write up the contract, will not write up the offer, so now the agent who's helped you get MLS Assistant Access, that signed you up, that got you in there, you can have them write up the contract for you, write up an offer for you. And it's the same thing with real estate agents. The more offers they send, the more money they are going to make. So when you realize this, you think about the value that you bring a real estate agent who can give you MLS Assistant Access. They can get out more offers every single day, every single week by working with you when they give you MLS Assistant Access. And you need to understand if you're a wholesaler or real estate investor, you're better than a regular buyer, like a normal buyer who goes out there and needs to see 20 houses to submit one offer, and it takes three to six months, like just a normal first-time home buyer. That happens a lot of the times. And so it takes maybe three or six months for an agent to see commission when this normal buyer is working with them, because they're only going to buy one house in three to six months. However, if you're a wholesaler and real estate investor, you probably want to wholesale multiple houses every single month or fix and flip multiple houses every single month. So you're giving this agent an opportunity to make multiple commissions every single month, or at least one. And that's the opportunity of working with you. And when you understand your value, know your worth, you can communicate that to a real estate agent. You can make it a no-brainer. You can make this agent feel silly for not giving you MLS Assistant Access. So when you use this existing network approach, you say, "Who in my family is a real estate agent? Who do I know that's a real estate agent?" Or even, "Who in my family used a real estate agent? Who are my friends who use a real estate agent?" And you ask for an introduction to be able to work with them and to be able to have this conversation with them. Well, now you know how to provide value to them because know your worth as a wholesaler and real estate investor. You know you can help them make more money on deals that they can represent you as your buyer's agent. Very important you understand that. And another way to incentivize a real estate agent to give you MLS Assistant Access is to understand that you either have a network of people that you know that want to buy or sell a house, even normal home buyers, it's fine. Or if you're just starting out in your real estate career, you're starting out wholesaling, know that you're going to be networking with a lot of people, and people are going to see you as a real estate person or expert in your area in maybe a few months or in six months or 12 months. People are going to ask you, "Hey, how do I buy this house? How do I sell my house?" So if you're not licensed, you can't technically sell that person's house for them or help them buy a house and get a commission, but you can refer them to the buyer's agent or to the agent that helps you get...

MLS Assistant Access. So, when you tell this agent, "Hey, we can submit offers together," the first way I told you, you're going to be submitting offers every single day, every single week. And if that offer gets accepted, you close on the deal; that buyer's agent gets paid money for giving you MLS Assistant Access and for representing you on that deal. But also, if you tell this agent that, "Hey, I'm going to be sending all my referrals to you; you're going to be my go-to agent for anyone I know in my network; I'm going to send them to you," well, that's a pretty darn good incentive for a real estate agent to just give you MLS Assistant Access and to help you get it. So that's why you need to be thinking about—remember WIIFT, What's In It For Them? Now, you understand that, this conversation's going to go amazingly well.

It's the people that don't think about this agent—don't think about, how can I help this agent grow their business?—that don't succeed in getting MLS Access because they don't incentivize the agent in any way whatsoever. So now that you know that, you're good to go. And that's just the existing network approach. It's what I recommend right now to be thinking about. But if you don't know anyone in your existing network, guess what? It's completely fine. I got two other ways on how you can get MLS Assistant Access.

Now, I want to go into the second way on how to get MLS Assistant Access in your area. So the second way is called the Craigslist ad approach. And what you want to do is create a Craigslist ad or post in your area to attract investor-friendly realtors and brokers that want to work with you. Because not every single agent is going to want to work with you when you're a wholesaler or real estate investor. There are retail agents that only want to sell beautiful million-dollar, two-million-dollar houses, only work with retail buyers, and they just don't want to work with any type of investor. They don't want to deal with cash properties. Those aren't the agents that are going to help us get MLS Assistant Access most of the time. So if we can attract and have agents come to us, that's what the Craigslist ad approach allows you to do.

So you can create a Craigslist ad; in the title you could say, "Looking for investor-friendly realtors in your city name." So let's say in the San Diego area, "Looking for investor-friendly realtors in San Diego area." And you can actually include an image of a distressed house. Go to Google images, type in distressed houses in, type in your city name, put a distressed house in there. So when someone looks at this, they understand you're an investor and you're looking for distressed houses. But then the post, you can say this exactly: you can say, "I'm a real estate investor in San Diego looking to work with investor-friendly realtors and brokers in the San Diego area. I am looking for a long-term relationship where we can work together for years and complete multiple deals per year. If you want to know more, then please contact me directly through this post. Thank you." And with that, when you create this post and you put it live on Craigslist, you will get some people contacting you. And those people should really only be investor-friendly realtors and brokers.

Now you've made your pool very small of the exact people that would want to work with you as a wholesaler or real estate investor that would want to help you get MLS Access because you now know how to incentivize them. You now know, understand how you can bring them more business and make them more money. And one best practice with the Craigslist ad approach is if you post it and maybe a week goes by and you don't get anyone reaching out to you, guess what? Post it again. And each week just create a new post. So refresh it so it comes up to the top of the feed to increase the chances that an investor-friendly broker agent reaches back out to you.

Now let's go into the third way on how to get MLS Assistant Access. This third approach is the groups approach, and these are online groups or in-person groups that you can go to. And it's really about going to places online or in person where investor-friendly agents and brokers hang out. This increases the chances you're going to meet an investor-friendly agent or broker and people that want to work with you so you can get MLS Assistant Access. Here are some examples of in-person meetings you can go to and how to find them. You can go to Google and type in "Real Estate Investors Association meetings in my area." And what these are, these are meetings that real estate investors hang out at, but not just real estate investors, people that want to work with real estate investors hang out there too. So you can create your own luck and increase the chances of you getting MLS Assistant Access by finding these meetings in your area. And when I started out, I would attend all the Real Estate Investor Association meetings in my area within an hour driving distance. Find what's closest to you, and a lot of times these meetings go on once a month or so. Find agents, find brokers that would want to work with you. You can meet face to face, build a relationship, and you can incentivize them with the ways I've told you how to incentivize them. And that way they can help you get MLS Assistant Access.

Now, you can also go to meetup.com. It's a great website that has meetup events, and type in "real estate investor meetings," "real estate investors association meetings," "real estate meetings." You can also go to eventbrite.com, just another website that has events and different types of networking events that you can meet these investor-friendly agents at. Now, I also mentioned online groups. So what I mean by that: So you can go to Facebook groups online and you can type in—let's say you're in Virginia—type in "real estate investor meetings in Virginia" or just "real estate investors in Virginia." You're going to find groups of real estate investors and people that want to work with real estate investors in a Facebook group. They hang out there, they create posts. And what you can do is actually just create a post in there. Use the same Craigslist ad language that I told you and create a post in that Facebook group, and you can have agents reaching out to you, investor-friendly agents and brokers, and then you can ask for help on getting MLS Assistant Access in your area. Join those groups, get accepted, create posts in there, find investor-friendly agents and brokers that you can contact to help get you MLS Assistant Access. And don't forget to incentivize them with what's in it for them—always thinking about them and how you can help them in their business.

So I've actually made a free resource on three ways on how to get MLS Assistant Access with slides, with what you need to say, with examples of that Craigslist ad and best practices, all in here. So you, your team, you can share this with each other and get access to the MLS and start getting wholesale and fix-and-flip deals from there. So all you need to do is go to realestateskills.com/MLS resource, and it will also be in the description below.

And now let's get into the best practices for getting MLS Access. So these are things you want to remember, so you make your job easier for you, and so you don't think you're the one person in the world who's not going to get access to the MLS, all right? So first off, don't think that. But what you want to do is always think about working with investor-friendly agents and brokers. Investor-friendly, investor-friendly. You're going to be talking to multiple different agents, multiple different brokers. You can't be turned off; you can't be discouraged when one person tells you no. You have to understand that every no gets you close to a yes. When we talk to investor-friendly agents and brokers, we greatly increase our chances of getting MLS Assistant Access because there's a lot of people that think all real estate agents are created equal, and they're not. Some are great to work with, and some are just really bad at their job. Some want to work on beautiful million-dollar houses and never talk to a real estate investor, and some love working with real estate investors. We want to find those people. It's typically not the big, big real estate brokerages, the big real estate franchises. Oh, it's typically not like the Compass or the Coldwell Banker, the Keller Williams, the Berkshire Hathaway. It's typically not those companies, because they're a little more corporate and they're really strict and may not give out a lot of MLS Access to a lot of different types of real estate investors. They might be a little more stringent. That's what we've seen. So who are the boutique investor-friendly brokerages in your area? These are non-national companies, maybe a smaller brokerage; they may hang out at the Real Estate Investor Association meetings, and these are the types of agents and brokers you want to develop relationships with. They're not worried about, "If I give assistant access to Alex, 'oh my gosh, what's he going to do? Is my whole business going to shut down?'" They want to give you MLS Assistant Access; these boutique brokerages want to work with you because they understand they're going to do more deals from working with you. You're going to bring them more opportunities to submit offers; you're referrals, just like you said you would.

All right, another best practice is when talking with a real estate agent and broker, some may say, "Hey, I can't give you MLS Assistant Access, but I can get you on my email list." Don't get on that email list. You don't want to get on there. A lot of people think, "Oh, I got MLS Access." But all the agent did was type in a few criteria and then send you these leads in an email. But guess what? You don't have the contact information of the listing agent; you don't have the confidential remarks. All you do is get automated email messages from this real estate agent. They have no idea what's going on with these deals; it's all software doing it, and it's not true MLS Access. You're going to be at the liberty of the deals that they send you, and you still can't even contact the listing agent directly. You're going to waste a lot of time if you get on an agent's email lists like that. So don't do that. That is not MLS Assistant Access. You want direct access to the MLS, okay?

Additionally, don't expect every real estate agent and broker to even know what the heck MLS Assistant Access is. It's really important to understand this. An agent doesn't know every single thing about real estate, nor does a broker. This may be the first time they've ever heard about it. So what could you do to anticipate this conversation? Maybe you Google, "What is the MLS in my city name" or "What MLS is in Virginia" or wherever you're at, and you start to understand, okay, this is the name of this particular MLS. Maybe go to the website and you type in "assistant," you search, and you find the page that you need to fill out for Assistant Access. So now when you talk to an investor-friendly agent or broker, you already know what it is. And if they're like, "Hey, what the heck is MLS Assistant Access?" You're like, "Oh, it's really easy. There's just one form to fill out on the website. All you need to do to actually have access to it, just at this link right here. How's that sound?" So when you do a little bit of preliminary research, you just go online, find the MLS in your particular market, search for "assistant access" or "MLS Access," "administrative access," do your due diligence beforehand, and now you're well prepared and you can inform this agent and actually show them what MLS Assistant Access is. And I'll put an example of an MLS Assistant form right here. This one specifically for Orlando, just so you can see what's on there. So typically you'll fill out the agent's information on there, the broker's information, your information. Typically, there is a cost to this MLS Assistant Access, but the cost is so nominal compared to what it's worth, having access to all the leads on the market. So you just fill out really simple information, contact information all in one page.

Now, I do recommend that you pay for Assistant Access. Don't put that on the real estate agent or broker. They're already helping you get Assistant Access. Typically, it's going to be like $25 to $75 per quarter, that's every three months. So it's not going to be a lot of money. It's going to be the best software, the best thing you can pay for in your real estate business. You're going to get the highest ROI from this. So don't worry about those costs. Do what you can to pay those costs and don't have that agent pay for it.

All right, so you made it this far in the video. I want to cover one other way on how to get access to the MLS without a real estate license. And that's just to use a real estate agent's or a broker's access to the MLS, their own username and password. Now, the downside of this is you have to ask them. There does have to be a lot of trust. Now, I do hope you build trust and rapport with every single person you work with, but some people may not feel comfortable doing that for obvious reasons. Also, if you're using someone else's login, they change the password, like some MLSs change the password every 90 days or so, then you have to bother them every 90 days or so. Whereas if you have your own login to the MLS, you have your own username, your own password, you never have to bother anyone about your access, and you can just keep using it forever. So just want to throw in that extra way on how you get access to the MLS without a real estate license.

So I appreciate you making it this far. And if you like this video, please check out any of our others that we have. We make a lot of great content. We share a lot of golden nuggets about wholesaling, real estate, and real estate investing. And I'm sure you'll love each and every video. And if you like this video, please like, subscribe, hit the notification bell, leave a comment below. We really love building a community. We love putting out this content that has really changed our lives and our students' lives, and we just want to share it with the world. So you can build a successful wholesaling and flipping business. You can get in the real estate game. This is something you're not going to learn in college; you're not going to be able to go to school to learn this. This is something—learn from the hard knocks or from experience. That's why I want to share it with you. So I hope everyone takes care. I'll talk to you soon. I'll see you on one of my next videos.