Free Boston MLS Access
Boston City Properties allows free access to the largest MLS database in Massachusetts. Click "Search Sales" below to view current up-to-the-minute real estate listings in the Boston area. The listings include the actual address, photos, virtual tours, and more. The database also includes listings in literally every city & town in the Greater Boston area. This website provides free access to MLS PIN, the largest multiple listing service in New England. The database includes over 40,000 up-to-the-minute listings for condos for sale, single family homes, multifamily houses for sale, commercial real estate, and apartments for rent. The system also contains over 1,000,000 off-market listings, public records, and more.
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The buying or selling of a piece of real estate, whether it's a home, a condominium, a multi-family building or any other type of property, requires information. Buyers need to know what's available. Sellers need to let people know what's for sale. Brokers need to know all that, and they need a way to match prospective buyers with properties that meet those buyers' needs.
That information has always been important, but it has not always been widely available. Before the 20th century, local Boards of Realtors would hold regular meetings at which they exchanged information about properties that were for sale, and brokers with clients who were in the market would come prepared to do business on the spot.
Over time, this system slowly evolved. Real estate listings, properties whose owners had retained brokers to handle the sales transaction, were, in fact, listed on paper, and those sheets of listings were distributed among brokers in a given geographical area. This was the beginning of the Multiple Listing Service or, as we know it today, the MLS, a centralized repository of information about properties that were on the market.
An MLS on paper had many advantages over a system that was strictly word-of-mouth, but it had a number of real disadvantages, too:
- Listings were perennially out of date, because there was no way to update a property's status instantaneously. If a property went, from "on the market" to "sold," the news would have to await publication of the next issue before the change was reflected in the listing sheets.
- Space was also an issue. A printed medium puts severe limits on the amount of information that can be shown, especially when it tries to be a handy, easy-to-use summary of properties on the market. Considerations of space also limit the ability to include historical information. Once a property was sold, it simply disappeared from the list. Everyone wants as much information as possible, but the publication soon becomes unwieldy as more and more information appears.
- Search was, to put it kindly, severely lacking. If, for example, a buyer wanted to search MLS for a property with specific features, that capability was the stuff of science fiction. Paper lists could be categorized in several ways, but a buyer who wanted a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath house with a large front garden had to find time to tour the area and see things in person.
Technology solved those problems. Today's MLS is a Web-based tool that gives you all the information you want with the click of a mouse. Updates happen immediately. Space limitations don't apply. Everything is searchable according to criteria you can customize at will.
In addition to solving those problems, the modern system enriches the experience with images, video and virtual tours, and it includes a wealth of historical data. The fact that a property was sold no longer removes all evidence of its existence from the database.
In the greater Boston area, the Multiple Listing Service, Property Information Network (MLS PIN) dominates the landscape. As of 2015, more than 30,000 licensed real estate professional subscribed to MLS PIN, and its database listed more than 33,000 active properties for sale, with historical data available for another 1.4 million properties not currently on the market. There are also thousands of apartments for rent on MLS. There is no central database in Massachusetts for apartments however MLS is the largest database in Massachusetts and all of the largest agencies post listings onto the MLS. You can also request to view apartments by move-in date from our website.
Here at Boston City Properties, we offer free access to MLS PIN. You'll find information on current listings in the Boston area, including addresses, interior rooms, square footage, lot size and more, along with photos, videos and virtual tours. Simply click the link above to access every kind of listing in Boston and surrounding cities and cities & towns.