Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us today on our FlexMLS fundamentals class on market trends and statistics. So let’s take a look at what we’ll look at today. And I’m going to start with just a review of the stats tab on the quick search screen or really really from any search. So we’ll talk about that. There’s a webinar already available on that, a short twenty minute webinar. And then we’ll spend the rest of our time talking about the market summary report as well as the market trends graphs. And both of those have recently received some UI updates, so I just wanna show those off as well. Let me exit this full screen mode and jump into Flex MLS, and we’ll start on the stats tab. And what I’m about to show you, it’ll make sense when I show the screens, but it’s really just going to tell you all of the stats for your current search results. So if you’ve got multiple statuses selected, it’ll tell you how many active or pending or closed are in that search, what’s the average median, low, high, and price on those, and it’ll give you some days on market information as well. So what does the stats tab look like from FlexMLS? I’m going to zoom in on my screen just a little bit and make it easier for you to see, and I’ll go to my quick search. I’ve already got that on my favorites bar, so I’ll click it.
And right here, I can start maybe I want to use the map or maybe I just want to use my fields. For this example, I’m going to use ZIP code or postal code in this current MLS that I’m using. So I am going to click on my search template, use residential. I may also say, well, I only want to see single family included. So in this search that I’m doing, I’ll select subtype single family, and then I’ll choose my location. Now, again, I could draw on the map, but for this example, I’ll just go to postal code and start typing in the postal code that I’m looking for. And I’m going to do five eight zero seven eight. Whoops. And, of course, maybe I want to include multiple postal codes or if I was looking in cities or subdivisions, you can always add multiple as well. So I’ll just add five eight one zero four as well. So just to show you as I’m looking here. Now I said that the what we’re about to see, the stats tab, shows us the information for the search itself. And right now, my search is only looking at active listings. So what I am going to do is I’m going to go back up to the top of my search template where it says status, and I’ll click on that just to expand and give me access to all of my statuses. If you want to select more than one status, make sure you use your control key or command key if you’re a Mac user, and select those statuses. So I’ve selected active, pending, and closed. I’m also going to just bring in listings that have been canceled, how many currently canceled listings do we have. And you’ll notice that the sold date, your MLS may have different defaults. Most go back one year, but you can always change the dates that you’re looking for here. And so I’m looking for active, pending, closed, and canceled, I just included to show you how that shows up on the stats tab. So let’s actually look at this on the stats tab. So I’m going to go, now that I’ve entered my search criteria, and move my mouse all the way to the right on my view row here where I could view the list, the detail, photos, stats is the very last option. So I’ll click on stats, and you’ll see I’ve got fifteen hundred listings that I could scroll through on the left. But this stats tab just gives me the search statistics. So at the top, I see how many are currently active, a hundred ninety eight. How many are currently pending, one fifty six. Closed within that time period back on my search tab, it was going back one year. So in the past year, one thousand seventy. Other. This status will only break out active, pending, closed, and remember when you see closed, think of that as sold listings, and other. So when you have something like a withdrawn listing or a canceled listing, hover over that little information bubble, and it tells you anything other than active, pending, and closed just gets grouped into that other category. And I see how many total we have. So we see the actual count on the right, and on the left, we see a nice graphical breakdown. Right underneath that, I see information, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, list price, sold price, sale to list price ratio, price change, and I can see the average median, low, and high statistics for those. So it gives me good information. In the past year, the average single family has sold for four hundred and nine thousand, and the median price, three sixty two. So with a sample this size, maybe there are some statistical outliers. Maybe I’m looking more at the median price than the average, but great fast information. And then the final section, depending on how your market uses days on market, you’ll see a section for days on market, and you’ll see it broken down by looking at the sold listings, how many were on market for zero to thirty days, thirty one to sixty, sixty one to ninety, ninety one to one twenty, and one twenty one plus. You’ll see sale to list price ratio. That SP over OLP, that sale price to original list price. So the original list price, so it also breaks that down. Again, it breaks that down graphically, and you can see the majority here, very easy to see, have been selling under thirty days.
And then your MLS may also use other types of days on market. This particular MLS uses agent days on market, how long has it been under a specific agent, and cumulative days on market, how long has it been on market even if it switched agents but wasn’t off market. Your MLS may or may not use that information, but, again, it’s the same information that’s held in this days original days on market one right at the top. So this is fantastic. If I just want a quick snapshot of how many listings are active, pending, and closed, what was the average sold price, median sold price, Very great at finding that information.
But sometimes you’re looking at statistics in order to say, what if I want to know what the average sold price is this past month compared to the six months ago. So I just want to compare that to another point in time. And, of course, I could go in and set my sold dates and look at search results and come back and set my sold dates for a previous time and look at those results. But there are built in statistical reports that allow you to compare statistics over time. And so that’s what we’re going to go into here. Now if you do want to know more information about using that stats tab that I just demonstrated on any search screen, we did a webinar for that previously.
If you go to help and go to the Flex MLS Academy, you will see all of the upcoming webinars as well as previously recorded trainings. I’ll zoom in on my screen, and you can actually see that recently broadcast web webinar quick statistics from search results. And that’s that stats tab, and a good fifteen minutes or so on using that.
And, again, that was just under help at the Flex MLS Academy. But now let’s move on to some more statistics because, like I said, we’ll look at some stat reports that allow us to compare data over time.
And the first one I’ll go to is the market summary reports. So this will show the state of our market over the past year, and it allows us to filter by location and property type. It’ll tell us exactly how calculations are being made. It allows us to save favorite locations. You could even use a if you’ve got any map overlays you’ve drawn, you can use those for locations. And then the results are easily printed, emailed, or even exported to use in your own programs. So let’s take a look at the market summary report. I’m going to go back to Flex MLS, and I’m going to open my menu. On my menu, as you scroll down, you’ll find a section there called statistics.
And the market summary report is the first one that I’ll look at. And I’m actually just going to put a star next to it, so I’ll pin it to my favorites for today.
So now I’ve got it pinned to my favorites. You don’t have to pin it to your favorites, but just so you can easily reference what I’m looking at, I just pinned it to my favorites. I just click that star next to it. So now I can go to it, one click.
Now if you have never been here before, it’s important to note that it is looking at the entire MLS. Some of your MLSs may be very big. Maybe you have multiple associations in the MLS. So if you want to look at more specific data, not just MLS wide data, but narrow that down to a specific city or zip code or maybe a map shape that you’ve drawn, There’s the ability to customize that up here. So I’m going to start with customizing it first, and then we’ll take a look at the data that is being displayed. So I’ll click on customize, and I’ll see three options, new location, previous locations that I’ve used, and favorite locations. So I’ll click new.
And for here, I can just type in city postal code. Maybe you have subdivisions in your or areas in your MLS or minor areas. I’m going to just use that postal code that we used in our previous search, and that was five eight zero seven eight in this example. I’ll double click it and you’ll see it added. Now one limitation of this market summary report is that I can only add one location at once. So if I want to go in and look at five eight one zero four for postal code, I’ll have to do that separately. So I’ll have to run this twice. So just keep that in mind. It’s looking at one location. The report date allows us to go through the most recently completed month, so this allows me to go through March of the most recent year. Now if I wanted to go through March of twenty twenty two, then it would look back through twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two. It always goes back one year from the date that I set here. So I’ll say March of twenty twenty three, it’ll go back one year, And then it allows me to use the property types. So your MLS may use slightly different property types, but most have a residential property type, and that’s what I’ll use in today’s example. Now because I’m a super user, I have this option here to see how this this is calculated. You won’t need to worry about that. Yours will just default on the most current version for this, and you’ll click on search. So when I do that, you’ll see that it is taking a few minutes to calculate because it’s looking at all that statistical data in the MLS, and then it populates it. So it tells me the location that I’m using, and I use the ZIP code, so that’s what is here, and it tells me the property type. And then I’m going to see six very specific graphs, the number of listings, listing prices, absorption rate, sale to list price ratio, days on market, and price volume.
As I look at something like this and say number of listings, I see active listings. I can hover over any of those data points, and it will tell me what month that was, June of twenty twenty two for this current data point, and there were a hundred and thirty two active listings. And grayed out underneath that, it’s probably hard for you to read on the screen, but it also tells me how many new listings and sold listings. So I can hover over those to see the data points. As I’m looking at this and say, well, I just want this to show active and sold listings. I’m not interested in how many new listings were brought on at this time.
You can always click to select or unselect any of those options you see underneath the graph. And you’ll notice it runs through April of twenty twenty two through March of twenty twenty three, the last completed month, going back twelve months.
As I’m scrolling down, I’ll come in and let me point out a couple of very important things. List prices. I see active median list price, new, median list price, sold, median sale price. And I might say, I don’t want to see the median price. I want to see the average price.
And this isn’t going to be a stats class where I get into why you would use average over median, but I’ll just come in here and click on this wrench. So each of these graphs in the upper right corner has a wrench. And this says, what are you displaying for our options?
So if I want to add average, I can add that in, and I can also remove. So you can customize these a little bit. That’s a very nice feature to have. So if I’m interested in using the average rather than the median, I can do that.
If I want to include both, it’s going to be a very busy graph, but I can include both average and median here as well, or go back to just using that median and clicking close. So if you see that little wrench in the upper right corner of the graph, you can change what’s going to be displayed and have different options that are available underneath for you to choose. If you’re looking at a graph and say absorption rate, it looks interesting, but what does that mean when it says the absorption rate on November of twenty twenty two was two point six three months? What does that mean and how is it calculated?
Each of these graphs also has this question mark in the upper right corner, and that’s just giving you help. So it tells me what the absorption rate is in months. It shows how long the current inventory of properties would last at the current rate of sale. So if there were no more new listings added, how long would it take it to get down to zero, basically? And then it tells you exactly how this is being calculated. So a is the active listings, a snapshot on the fifteenth of the month, and n is the average listing sold during each of the previous twelve months. And it’s calculating that. So it tells you exactly how these calculations are made, what’s being displayed in the graph. So that’s really great to know if you’ve got questions on how is this being calculated. This is a fantastic market summary report to use because it provides all of that information in a very usable format so you can understand what’s being displayed. And this is also nice because it allows me to quickly look at this and say, what’s our average price currently? How does that stack up against a year ago or six months ago? I can see that graphically.
I can also scroll down underneath these six graphs and see summary statistics, where it’s going to show me the absorption rate March of twenty twenty three compared to March of twenty twenty two. And the same thing with our average list price, median list price, average sale price, median sale price, and days on market information. So I can compare last completed month to one year ago for that completed month that what’s the difference? It also, on the far right, shows year to date information. So this year to date, twenty twenty three year to date, compared to the same time frame year to date for twenty twenty two and how that compares. So it allows me to compare over time. So this is very nice where I can see trends as far as number of listings, price of listings, the sale to list price ratio of listings, how that’s changing, and I can take that into consideration. Finally, under the summary statistics, we’re going to see a breakdown of sold listings this month and year to date, and how that compares this month to the same month one year ago, year to date this year compare compared to the same year to date one year ago. And it breaks it down in price categories. So I’m going to see different categories. For instance, I can quickly see that the majority of listings in twenty twenty three fall into this two hundred and fifty thousand to three hundred and fifty thousand dollar range for those sold listings. I see twenty here.
Pending listings also gives me those price point breakdowns. Active and new listings are also here. Now your price breakdowns may not look identical to what you see on my screen. Each MLS can set those, but you as an individual user in the MLS, you cannot set those. So those are those are set at your MLS level, your MLS or association sets that. You can’t customize those price points. Those are just kind of defaulted in the system for your particular MLS. So that’s the market summary and how it works. Some other things under customize, we looked at new location. I can also look at previous locations. I’m going to click one more new location. I mentioned if you drew your own shape and saved it as a map overlay on a search, you can use those overlays. I’m just typing in area. I have an area fifty one overlay that I’ve drawn previously, And I save that under overlays. If you want to know more about drawing overlays, you can always go to the Flex MLS Academy and type in overlays. But I’ll just type in and use one of my previous overlays. So this is looking in a shape that I’ve drawn. And, again, I’m just going to click on search after making those selections. When I’m using a custom overlay to bring up information for the market summary reports, it’s important to note it takes a little bit longer to calculate because it has to geolocate every single listing over the past year and then compare it to the shape I’ve drawn. If you’re wondering what that shape looks like, let’s just open a new tab, and I’ll click on quick search just to show you I had previously drawn a shape. So I drew my own overlay and called it area fifty one, and that’s what my overlay looks like. That’s the overlay that it’s using in this market summary report. So I can do that. And now when I go to customize and look at previous locations, I can see the ones that I’ve run previously. Here’s area fifty one. If I want to mark it as a favorite, you’ll notice as I hover my mouse over that, there is a star next to it. It might be hard to see with the contrast on your screen, but where my mouse is hovering, it’s a star. So I’m going to click that, and you’ll see it kind of disappeared. And it says it’s been moved to favorite locations. And if I want to come in, there’s five eight zero seven eight that we did previously. I’m going to star that. And, again, it tells me it’s under my favorite locations. If I go to customize, I will see the option to go to my favorite locations. So these are the ones that I’ve marked as favorites. So if I want to go in and use these and run these monthly, I can always navigate away.
And when I come back to market summary, because those are my favorite locations, When I click on customize, I just go to favorites, make sure I’ve got the most recently completed month set, and then I just click on search, and it’s going to run that for the location that I’ve selected. So I can bounce between those locations fairly quickly.
Now this market summary report does have some limitations, and one is there’s limited search criteria. You’ll notice when I go in to customize this and I’m using a location, I can only use one location at once. I can look at different property types, residential, land, commercial, whatever’s in your MLS. But maybe residential, I’d rather just see residential single family. It doesn’t allow me to drill in to search criteria. It’s just showing me all residential listings. So limited search criteria only displays information for a single location, and it only goes back one year. And so if I wanted to come in and say, well, I want to compare March or April of twenty twenty two to twenty three, but also then the previous year, so April of twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two, I can click and reset this and then click on search again and reset that information. You’ll notice my months at the bottom of these are going to change, twenty one to twenty two. But again, that’s a little bit cumbersome if I want to do a longer time period. I can’t just say, let’s start and give me the past two years of data. So that brings me looking at those limitations to our next reports.
Before I move on to that next report, I’ll also mention this report as well as the next one that I’m going to show you does have the option where I can print this, email it, or export that data. So again, if I click on print, this is just going to open up my computer print screen here. And I can come in and print all of that. Or maybe I just wanted these market graphs here. I could just say, let’s print pages custom print pages one to one. And, again, this is just my browser print functions. Functions. This is not FlexMLS. And then I would click, select my printer location or save it as a PDF and print from there. So just to remind you that you do have those, that ability to share this with somebody, or maybe I want to email this to a contact. They’re look wanna give them information about their neighborhood or something like that. Easy to share by just emailing that to them as well. But with the limitations in mind of limited search criteria, going back only one year at a time, and displaying only a single location, We’ll move on to our final report to talk about today, which is the market trends graphs. With the market trends graphs, it’s going to show display much of the same information, but in a little bit of a different format. So it’ll be multiple ways to view the state of your market over a set period of time, and I have a little bit more control over this period of time. I could go back two years, for example, if I’d if I’d like.
And it will show us the number of listings, price trends, sale to list price ratio, days on market, months of inventory, and volume. Much of the same information that we saw in our previous one. So from here, I’m going to go to my menu, and I’m going to scroll back down under my statistics section, market trends graphs. And again, I’ll put a star just to pin this on my favorites menu so I’ve got that one click access. Market trends graphs. When we come here, again, the default is going to display information for the entire MLS if you’ve never been here before. And I see it as tabbed. So rather than multiple graphs like we had on our market summary report, it only displays one at a time. So I see number of listings, price trends, sale to list price ratio. And you’ll notice it doesn’t give me there’s no tool up here where I can say what options do I have, the options that appear underneath each graph. Those you can select or deselect, but I can’t actually change the options that are available. But I can come through here, and right now it’s going March of twenty twenty one through March of twenty twenty three. It’s giving me two years of information. If you said I only want one year, you can always change this and click go, and it will refresh that data. So a little bit more power with the date ranges that I have to select.
In addition to that, if I scroll back up at the very top of this, there is a filters option. So it’s looking at the entire MLS right now, but maybe I want to look at two ZIP codes. I can do two ZIP codes. It’s not going to compare one to the other, but I can add both of them in. I could add in single family under residential. So what I did is I clicked on filters. I can start using a a quick search template. If I’ve saved a search, I could obviously use one of my saved searches here. But, really, the easiest option is just say, let’s put in our search criteria. So I’ll click on quick search. I’ll select one of the quick search templates available in my MLS, or if you have your own custom ones, they’d be here as well. And then just click on filter after I select that from the list. I’m gonna look at residential, click on filter. And so what am I going to include? Now I’m not going to select status because I want all statuses included. So if I don’t select statuses, all statuses will be included. I’m not looking at list prices, but I do want to look at subtype. I want to make sure that I’m only pulling in information for single family in this example. Or if I wanted to include single family and townhouse, hold down your control key, command for Mac users, and I could include that as well. Now I’ll just do one sub subtype here.
I could do locations, cities, or postal codes. And I mentioned, if I’m selecting multiple items from the list, I’ll select one, and I’ll select the other. It’s going to combine the data. It’s not going to break it out. I won’t see a separate graph comparing five eight zero seven eight to five eight one zero four. I will not see a separate comparison.
It’s just including both of those locations in my results. And I’m going to keep scrolling down. If I wanted to only look at newer properties, I could put in your built or waterfront properties. But really, for this example, I just wanted these two ZIP codes, subtype of single family, and then I’ll click on next. And now it’ll take those filter criteria. It tells me what I’ve selected, residential, single family, in these postal codes. And now I’ve got all of that information here. If I want to see we selected last time just one year. If I wanna see this over a couple of years, see those price chant trends, just change that date at the bottom of the screen where my mouse was and click go. And now you’ll see the past two years worth of data still has that filter applied single family, just those two postal codes. And again, you don’t have to use postal code, I’m just doing that for today’s example. And as I’m looking at this, I might want to say I see active listings, new listings, pending and sold. If I’m not interested in pending, I can click that and just remove that so the the graph is less busy. And I can always hover over any of those points, and it tells me active on ten October twenty twenty two, two hundred and seventy six active listings, new listings, a hundred and three. But as I scroll underneath this, it’s nice and contained at the top, but the actual data table is underneath this too.
If I click, it’ll expand that, and it will show me act the the information month by month. So I can just quickly see that. So if you just wanna see and compare the numbers, I’m going to just see and compare those numbers. So graphically, always a nice representation, but nothing beats that actual numbers, especially if you want to export this to use in your own spreadsheets. So this is number of listings, price trends. So I can see active, median list price, pending median list price, sold median sale price. Again, I can go with average prices, add those in, make this look really busy, or deselect some. And as I change from one to the other, price trends to sale to list price ratio, for example, my filter still applies, my date still applies until I manually change that. And again, I had shown the data table here. I can always just scroll up and hide that data table.
So this is very nice as well if I want to share this. If somebody is in, maybe I want to go into my filter and just look at five eight zero seven eight and get rid of one of those. I could always narrow that down. But to share this with somebody, I can always print it and include it as part of a presentation for someone. As I’m looking at this, you’ll notice it separates onto two sheets. You can always go in with your browser printer settings and shrink the size, increase the size, trying to get it to play nicely with your print job here. But what I also like to do is the email option. I wanna show you this, and it works the same way on our market summary report. When I email this to somebody, and I could come in here and say, want to email this to Megan Phillips. And normally, would be defaulted here, send that using Flex MLS, and I would email it to Megan. But I want to show you what it looks like when the contact receives it. So instead of using Flex MLS to send it, I’m just going to get the link. So you could do this if you wanted to copy and paste the link into your own email, like if you use Gmail or something like that. You can say, give me the link. I’m going to get that link, and let me just copy that link address. And I’ll open you open a new window. And when I send this to Megan and she opens it up and clicks on it, it’ll open up this link. So this is what Megan receives. So she’s going to see I sent the sale to list price ratio. It tells her the filters that were used. It’s looking in that location, five eight zero seven eight five eight one zero four. But she has the option to say number of listings, price trends. So this gives them that same information you get. Now Megan doesn’t have the ability to go in and change the filters like we do, but she can see the same information. She can also access and show and hide the data. So as she comes in here and looks at that average median, average median days on market, sale to list price ratio, all of that information is going to be available when I share this with someone. So again, what I did to share that, I’m just gonna click return to market trends, is I just went to the email option. And normally, when I share this, I would just send it from Flex MLS. That way I would see a record of it in my menu. When I go to my sent emails, I would see a record of it that it’s in my sent emails. I’d see who I sent it to, and that way I can keep track of it. But I just grabbed the link for it just to demonstrate what that looks like today. Now I’m gonna cancel that from right here.
Now the very last thing that I will show today, we’ve looked at the market trends graphs, and we’ve looked at the market summary report.
One other thing that I am able to do is this market summary report that we looked at initially, like I said, it only compares one or it looks at one location at a time. However, I can create a dashboard if I’m interested in keeping statistics and I want to compare those two ZIP codes that I’ve used today, five eight zero seven eight, five eight one zero four, And I want to look at some of this information and quickly compare two zip codes or two cities or two areas if your MLS uses areas or sub areas or two different shapes I’ve drawn.
I’m going to click on my logo in the upper left corner, and I’m just going to create a custom dashboard. So here I’ve got the MLS dashboard. That’s the dashboard your MLS uses. I’ve got my home dashboard. I’m going to create a brand new dashboard, and I’m going to just call it my stats dashboard.
So to create a new dashboard, go to customize in the upper right where my mouse is hovering, And I can add gadgets on an existing dashboard, but I can also add my own custom dashboard. So I’ll click on add. Now there are stats dashboards that are available to you, but I’m going to start with a blank one and just show you what it looks like to build a dashboard. So I’ll just call this stats, and I’ll click create the dashboard. Now there’s nothing on my dashboard yet. So here, add gadgets. I’m building one for stats, so I’ll go down to my statistics category on the left. And then I’ll come in and say, let’s add absorption rate. And I want to compare multiple locations. Maybe I’ll compare three locations. So I’m gonna click add another and add another. And maybe I want to look at inventory. I can add as many of those as I want, and I’m going to add three. I’m gonna compare three locations today. And then I’ll click return to my dashboard. And you’ll see in the upper left now, I’ve got something called stats dashboard. So I can always get back to it. I’ve got my default home dashboard. That’s where I go when I click on the logo or when I log in. But I can always just click on my dashboards and click to go to my stats. Now I told you I want these absorption rates, these graphs that we’ve drawn to look at different locations. We can customize each of these gadgets, and we can customize the display of our dashboard. So I will click on customize, and I’m going to click on change layout. So it’s a second option under customize. I’m going to give it three panels.
And then you can drag and drop your gadgets.
Oops. Got that in the wrong place. Now these are all copies of each other right now. To point these at different locations, I can always come into the settings. So I want this one to be five eight zero seven eight.
And I’m going to then click on I’m looking at residential. I’ll click on save. I have to go to the next one, do the same thing, and we’ll do this five eight one zero four.
And we’ll click on save. And this one, maybe we’ll look at the, North Dakota State University, everything around here. So I’m looking at different locations for each one, so I’m getting different information on each one. It doesn’t surprise me there’s no properties on the university right there. And then I can come in and do the same thing for my inventory.
So I’ll save those. So that allows me to make quick comparison. So I just set up a column for each that I wanted to compare. Maybe I wanna change this to the MLS as a whole and get rid of anything from here and just say, how does it compare to the entire MLS? I can remove that and just click on save.
And when I’m looking at a dashboard, all of the stats gadgets that are available are the same graphs that display in that market summary report, number of listings, listing prices, absorption rate. So all of those are available to put on my custom dashboard. But like I said, this is one way if I’m looking at comparing different locations. Now with each of these, since it’s the market summary, I still do have that limitation. They only show one location at once and limited to showing everything within a specific property type. So, again, here, if I go to the settings, I can’t say residential and narrow it down to single family, but it does give me a nice thumbnail view of all residential listings. So you can’t drill down further than that. It’s basically the same limitations as the market summary, but now I have those nice quick comparisons that I can make.
So that concludes today’s class. We reviewed the stats tab on available on any quick search, which just gives you a snapshot of all of the your search results. How many of each status are there, the average and median information for those within a given set of search results. The market summary report, which we came out here and had all six of those graphs available at once and customizing that using previous locations, setting in a previous location as a favorite, and sharing that by email, print, or exporting it to use myself. And finally, the market trends graphs, which gives us very similar information, but it allows us to use a longer time range so I can see and compare that over a longer period of time, as well as drill down with the filters by using a quick search template here and really drill down into the information that we want to include in this. So that is our class on market trends and statistics. I hope you enjoyed it, and I look forward to seeing you at our next class.
