Christopher Zoller is a broker associate with EWM Realtors, and the 2015 Residential President of the Miami Association of Realtors, working in Miami.

Every week, we ask a Miami real estate professional for their thoughts on the top three stories from the week before. This week, we spoke with Christopher Zoller, a broker associate with EWM Realtors, and the 2015 Residential President of the Miami Association of Realtors. 

Miami Agent (MA): Zillow recently unrolled a new “Coming Soon” feature, which allows agents to list houses prior to them being on the market. The announcement has caused several to question the method of advertising houses before they’re on the market. Have you seen this trend, and what are your thoughts on it?

Christopher Zoller (CZ): We haven’t seen it happening in Miami and for one very good reason: The Southeast Florida Multiple Listing Service has specific laws prohibiting this kind of time frame for pre-marketing. We are pretty much required to get our listings into the MLS in less than 48 hours from signing the listing. It’s not the kind of thing where you can walk around with a pocket listing, which is essentially what they amount to, for five or ten days, or two weeks, or whatever, trying to shop it around on your own before you get a chance to expose it to the open market.

We feel that it’s important because it’s a disservice to our sellers to limit their exposure. Truth be known, the best way to sell a house or condo in Miami is to get it out to the almost 60,000 members who subscribe to our local MLS. You can’t get better marketing than that.

So, if you take a pocket listing and sit around telling your 10 or 20 friends, or even your buyers, what good are you really doing the seller that they wouldn’t get on the MLS. Zillow’s “Coming Soon” feature seems to be another attempt convince the public they’re forerunning.

The truth is that pocket listings and marketing tactics like them have been around long time, they’ve definitely happened in Miami, but they’re not serving the sellers well.

MA: Miami is a market rich with multicultural buyers, many investing from overseas. What do you do specifically to reach out to and work with this demographic?

CZ: I have been selling in Miami since 1989, and some of my very first clients came to me from Mexico and Brazil. I have continued to network with some of those very same clients throughout my entire career – some I’ve known for more than 20 years. I’ve been able to continue reaching out to additional clients over the years, and suddenly I’m realizing I have buyers in France, and now I’ve got buyers in Sweden, and Italy. At the same time, I have people living here in Miami and they want to buy properties in Spain, so I get to reach out to our Realtors in Madrid and Barcelona. I’m essentially networking across global lines, and that’s how I built my international business. Of course, I speak a little Spanish, which is also helpful here. But if they’re buying from overseas, they usually speak enough English to get by.

Having said that, at the Miami Association of Realtors, where I was elected as the 2015 residential president, we offer several tools to our members. The first is an essentially free website called ProxioPro, which translates all of our information, whether it’s a resume or personal bio or all of our listings, into 28 different languages. That’s online and can be accessed anywhere in the world.

Additionally, MAR puts out a “Foreign Investors Guide” with descriptions, information and important contacts. And we actually publish our contracts in eight different languages in that guide. It was a very interesting process, putting it together. We enlisted the help of attorneys and translators and other professionals to ease the process.

My own foreign investment business, which, in some years, represents as much as 25 percent of my overall business, comes mostly by way of referrals and connections.

MA: Our recent Truth About Agents survey found that more than 90 percent of Miami agent respondents expect to run into more multiple offer situations in 2014 than 2013. Do you agree, and why is this the case?

CZ: I actually took part in the survey, and I remember, at the time, we were still on a fast track, a very busy track, we were having trouble keeping up with demand and we were expecting an influx of multiple offer siutuations. Our inventory was at about two or three months supply – and you know a balanced market is when you have about a six month supply.

Surprisingly, since that survey, things have taken a major shift and most of our markets now are averaging about a five and a half months supply of inventory. It’s true that there was a tremendous pent up buyer demand throughout 2013 and the beginning of 2014, not to mention continuing price increase, which led to the atmosphere of so many multiple offer situations, but now we have only slightly less than a balanced market. Of course, the right house is definitely going to attract multiple buyers and multiple offers, especially if the seller is realistic.

We started to witness a little buyer resistance in May. Sellers started listing their houses above market value and buyers started resisting, and its created a bit of a lull. It’s important to remember, though, that Miami is the antithesis of the rest of the country. Where the northern markets pick up in summer – school gets out, the weather gets better and people start buying up properties right and left – Miami tends to slow down. June is a time when schools out and families leave, the winter birds are leaving and we have one of our quieter months of the year.

So, right now, we’re not really expecting a lot of multiple offer situations, but I do think that come late summer, early fall we’ll start to see demand pick up. It’s hard to tell whether it will surpass that of last year.