Back before there was such a thing as smart phones…back before “broadband” Internet was widely available for most people…back when Netscape was battling it out with Internet Explorer for supremacy on the world wide web…

There was the MLS book. To you youngsters out there, it may seem incredible, but there was once a time when Joe Sixpack couldn’t just jump on his smart phone and browse the latest real estate listings. Real estate listings were a closely guarded commodity belonging only to Realtors. If you wanted to know what was for sale, you had to talk to a Realtor. Realtors would browse through the MLS book, updated twice a month, to find homes to show buyers.

Most civilians have never seen the inside of an MLS book. And neither had I, until just yesterday, when I met someone who actually had what was probably one of the last MLS books ever printed in Santa Cruz county, in 1998…at least, the current MLS system has listings beginning in 1998, and not before.

So let’s hope in the Way Back machine and look back in time to late 1998, to see how homes were marketed back then, and what they cost. Check out these pictures: