When real estate agent John Kessler is hired to sell a house, he starts before it's ready.
He shares on Facebook, posts on LinkedIn and blasts an email to thousands of agents in his network while the owners prep, painting and clearing their basements. It can be a few weeks before the house goes live on the official multiple-listing service, a subscriber-only resource used by agents that contains active listings in the Mid-Atlantic region.
But that process could change. The Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc. launched a new "coming soon" feature in November designed to make those previews available across its system.
MRIS, which has 41,000 customers in the Mid-Atlantic, is one of the first agent databases in the country to add coming-soon listings. The free online search site Zillow started a "coming soon" feature in June.
MRIS officials said the new offering was a response to the years after the housing crash, when relatively few properties came to market and agents grew worried that buyers were settling on houses they felt lukewarm about, only to find that their dream home became available a few weeks later.
The new feature extends the marketing period for sellers and levels the playing field among buyers' agents, creating transparency for those who are less well-networked, industry members said.
"This is, I think, a really positive mechanism to take something that was going on in an informal way and create a more formal way that agents can talk about something that's coming," said Andrew Strauch, vice president of product innovation and marketing for MRIS. "Just as markets change, what people want changes, so we concentrate very, very hard on listening to our agents and our brokers."
The "coming soon" option allows an agent to post a listing up to three weeks before it goes live, at which point buyers can visit and put in offers. Buyers' agents that subscribe to the service, which costs $165 a quarter or $55 a month, can gauge their clients' interest with a drive-by viewing of the property and then use the extra notice to get financial papers in order.
About 494 properties were posted last month under the new status, which became available Nov. 18, according to MRIS.
"I think it will help me. ... I'm a full-time, 28-year professional. I'm on top of what's on the market, so it's going to allow me to try to give my buyers a leg up," said Kessler.
But Kessler said he is worried that agents with "coming soon" listings may give some colleagues better access than others.
"The downside I see is making sure that everyone plays fair. I love the concept on a certain level, but I want to see how our industry handles the power," he said. "I'm going to have to wait and see how it goes."
Jon Coile, who chairs the MRIS board and is president and CEO of Severna Park-based Champion Realty, said the new feature should help combat the practice of "pocket" or "whisper" listings, when agents market property to a select group of colleagues without advertising it publicly, a practice that critics say can lead to a lower sales price.
"We saw our agents doing work-arounds to try and accomplish their goals without a 'coming soon' status," Coile said. "It was pretty amateur, so to speak. If our agents and our sellers and our landlords are looking for a professional-grade solution, we should just provide some rules around it so it can't get hijacked from 'coming soon' into a pocket listing."
The transparency extends only so far: Unlike an active listing, the information will not go to networks such as Zillow and Trulia, which buyers can access without an agent.
Restricting the information protects sellers from a flood of prospective drive-by buyers, Strauch said. It also means buyers are less likely to go directly to the sellers' agent, cutting a colleague out of the deal.
"The MLS in America… creates a very stable, rules-based market, where buyers and sellers all understand what the rules of engagement are," Coile said.
A Zillow spokeswoman declined to say whether the site hoped to gain access to the information.
"Home sellers should have many options when it comes to the marketing of their home," spokeswoman Amanda Woolley wrote in an email. "It's a conversation for the agent to have with his or her client."
Some agents said they think the information could be shared with the public — who often combine Zillow and Trulia searches with an agent — without hurting agents.
"I find so many of the people looking for properties on Trulia and Zillow are working with real estate agents. … I don't know that that's necessarily a concern," said Marc Witman, a partner at Berkshire Hathaway Homesale Realty based in Baltimore County.
Witman said he felt "conflicted" about restricting the information until the property goes live. "I think that you could make an argument that if the purpose is to let the world know that it's coming soon, then you let the whole world know it's coming soon."
Towson-based Coldwell Banker agent Amanda Mitchell was one of the first agents in the Baltimore area to list a property using the feature, taking advantage of it for a recently remodeled three-bedroom house on Anneslie Road.
"I've always tried to be assertive and really work through my colleagues, so I've been able to get properties for clients that have not ever made it to the MLS. This 'coming soon' is sort of a reaction to that need," she said.
Mitchell said she hadn't received any calls in the first two days, but she still plans to tell sellers about the feature.
"It will be interesting to see how many more people utilize it, but I think it's a great tool," she said. "Anything we can do to help our sellers get exposure and [help] our buyers have a jump on a new listing."