At two of our SOS meetings this month, there was debate about the use of the Seller’s Description of Property form. A ‘best practice’ suggestion made was to have the seller verify the data you enter into the MLS to ensure you are accurately disclosing property details.  A quick and easy tool to help you capture the characteristics of a property you are about to list… and to protect yourself, is to use a blank input form when touring the property for sale – and have the seller sign it when complete.  It’s a great conversation starter about the facts of the home, allows you to look like a pro, and ensures you are sharing the seller’s property representations accurately.  You can also provide the seller with this form to sign based on the entry in the MLS.  Below are the instructions for each.

The one minute version:  For a blank form that you can bring to your listing appointment and have the seller sign off as you check off property attributes, simply go to FlexMLS, Daily Functions, then Input forms.  There you can select how detailed do you want the form to print, add your logo, change the disclosure text if needed.  When you’re done, hit print and you have a handy check off sheet that follows the input screens in the MLS, and allows your seller to review your selections and sign off on the marketing/disclosures about the property before you enter it into the MLS system. Here is a sample listing sheet Residential Input (but you should re-print every time, as it is dynamically generated and updated each time a field in our system is changed or modified!)

For a blank form:

Want to raise the bar even higher in 3 minutes or less?  Before your listing appointment, add a new listing by entering the property address and letting the tax records auto-populate.  Complete all of the listing data you know, but save the listing as incomplete first.  Go to your Add/Change menu, go to your incomplete listings, you have the option to print or email … select print input form (shown below) and your form will have all of the tax and assessor’s data already completed.

For a form from a from an incomplete listing:

Example of form with completed info:

Viola!