The MLS Story

Early Stumble

The MLS has been a bedrock of the Canopy Realtor® Association for so long that it’s hard to believe that hasn’t always been the case.

The MLS began about two years after the Association launched in 1921, but within a year, mentions of it disappeared in Association minutes. Why the MLS succumbed is lost to posterity, but board minutes from the time note problems as “overpricing of properties and not listing properties likely to sell quickly.”

Not until nearly three decades later would the MLS reemerge to stay. It was incorporated on Feb. 24, 1950, as a nonstock, nonprofit corporation known as the Charlotte Multiple Listing Bureau, and called “The Multiple” by most members. 

Many years later, the MLS would become a for-profit Association subsidiary in 1991 and gain its own board in 2003. The MLS would also have many names along the way, and since mid-2019 has been known as Canopy MLS.

10 Realtors® at $100 each

In restarting the MLS in 1950, 10 Realtors® put down $100 each, picked a chairperson, hired a secretary and obtained an office in Latta Arcade on Tryon Street, said 1950 Association President John Dwelle in an interview for the Association’s history. Most of the Association’s estimated 60 members lacked faith that other agents would turn in their best listings. Nonetheless, the MLS “took off after two or three years,” Dwelle noted.

Evolving Technology

The revived MLS consisted of a notebook of mimeographed pages assembled each week at the Latta Arcade office. By the early 1970s, the Association invested in printing presses and began producing a printed book of loose-leaf pages that came out bi-weekly. In the mid-1970s the MLS became a bound printed book — which the Association outsourced in 1987 and then eliminated not long after the computerized Maestro system began in December 1998. 

In 2003, the Maestro system gave way to an internet-based system called Tempo. As technology improved, Tempo was updated over the years and then gave way to a new system in 2014 called Matrix.

First Growth

As the Charlotte metro area grew in the 1980s and 1990s, several nearby MLSs consolidated their organizations with what is today Canopy MLS: Union County (included Anson County) in 1989, followed by Lincoln County and Cabarrus (included Montgomery, Stanly counties) in 1993. Gaston County came on board in 1994, as did Iredell County (including Alexander County except Wittenburg Township) the same year.

More Expansion

Nearly 30 years later, in the late 2010s, Canopy MLS took an even bigger regional leap and began providing service for Realtors® in western North Carolina and the greater Rock Hill area of South Carolina.

“We applaud these MLSs for being forward-thinking and for their desire to better serve their members,” said 2020 Canopy MLS President John Kindbom. “Ultimately, this type of alliance strengthens our MLS as well as helps our brokers realize greater cost savings and standardization of data across the industry.”

North Carolina Mountains MLS, made up mainly of Buncombe, Haywood and Henderson counties, consolidated with Canopy MLS in 2018. Other counties in the mountains group included Polk, Madison and Transylvania counties.

A year later, MLSs from Burke, McDowell and Salisbury/Rowan counties joined in 2019, as did South Carolina’s Piedmont Regional MLS, made up of York, Lancaster and Chester counties. In 2020, North Carolina-based MLSs in Cleveland and Catawba counties (included Caldwell County) merged with Canopy MLS.

At the end of 2020, Canopy MLS had 20,192 subscribers and served Realtors® in 25 counties in North and South Carolina.