The online home listings movement started out in the early-1990s, as home listings data were shared with the public through kiosks that were set up at Longs Drugs stores in the San Diego area. Austin, Texas, was the first market to offer its listings on the Internet, followed by Miami.

Around that time a group of real estate professionals were devoted to promoting the concept of a national MLS. Although they met some resistance, the progressive voices were being more successful. Then Microsoft announced it was getting into online real estate and wanted to pay MLSs to publish listings on its HomeAdvisor Web site. That only fortified the National Association of Realtors' commitment to its online venture HomeStore, accelerating the number of MLSs that participated in putting their listings on the Web.

It was the convergence of events that spawned putting the MLS on the Web. It took the Web to free up the MLS, because at the time, it was publicly published nowhere else. The only way to see a home listing was to visit a Realtor.

Today, Realtors can automatically list homes on websites like Realtor.com, and many on other broker sites. This allows masses of people to 'window shop' to help educate themselves on what is available, where, and how much it will cost. Before the Internet, this was almost impossible for buyers to really understand all aspects related to real estate. The use of the internet has helped educate and empower many people.

Today, MLS data is on the Web in many different forms and there is no turning back. The internet has transformed how real estate is bought and sold. The trend has created a real estate marketing explosion and also a multitude of questions for an industry that for 100 years held listing data to itself. Millions of people are clicking on real estate URLs and searching millions of homes on the Internet. The number of Web sites offering direct access to the MLS has proliferated nearly as fast as the number of people searching the Web for houses.

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