What Is a Property Subtype on an MLS Listing?

Last updated: August 5, 2026

Property subtype is the MLS field that names the specific style of a listing, such as Single Family Residence, Condominium, or Townhouse, inside its broader property type. It is a separate field from property type in the RESO Data Dictionary, the standard most MLSs follow, and it does not apply to every property type. The two fields have their own names: PropertyType and PropertySubType. PropertyType carries nine standard values, from Residential to Land to Business Opportunity. PropertySubType carries 31, from Single Family Residence to Boat Slip. Three of those nine carry no subtype at all, and Land is the one you are most likely to meet, which is why a vacant lot’s listing sheet often shows a blank. The gap matters in a search too. A townhouse and a condominium can both sit under Residential, so subtype is the only field that separates them.

Key Takeaways

1. PropertySubType applies to only six of RESO’s nine PropertyType values: Residential, Residential Lease, Manufactured In Park, Commercial Sale, Commercial Lease, and Business Opportunity.
2. Land, Farm, and Residential Income are the three PropertyType values that carry no subtype under RESO Data Dictionary 2.0.
3. RESO defines 31 standard PropertySubType values, with 95% adoption across 327 of 344 reporting organizations.
4. A fee simple townhouse and a condominium can both carry PropertyType Residential, so only PropertySubType separates them in a search.
5. Fannie Mae’s Selling Guide caps residential purchase eligibility at four units, and MLSs classify buildings with five or more units as Commercial Sale or Commercial Lease.

Property Type vs. Property Subtype: The Two MLS Fields

Open any MLS listing input form and you will find these two fields near the top, one after the other. They aren’t synonyms, though they get treated as interchangeable all the time.

PropertyType is the broad class a listing belongs to. Nine standard values, with field-level adoption of 99% across 342 of the 344 organizations that report usage data to the Real Estate Standards Organization.

PropertySubType is the style inside that class. RESO’s own definition calls it “a list of types of residential and residential lease properties (e.g., Single-Family Residence, Condominium, Townhouse) or a list of subtypes for mobile.” There are 31 standard values with 95% adoption across 327 of 344 organizations. Single Family Residence, Condominium, and Townhouse are the ones you will see most on the residential side; Office and Retail on the commercial.

Both fields are documented in RESO’s field metadata as “String List, Single.” One value each, per listing. Not a multi select.

Here’s why that matters on a real block. Picture a fee simple townhouse and a condominium unit two doors apart, same street, same brick, same roofline. Both carry PropertyType Residential. A buyer who filters a search on property type alone gets both back, and nothing on the results page tells them apart.

PropertySubType does. One listing reads Townhouse (60% adoption), the other reads Condominium (79%). Underneath the label, the ownership form is genuinely different. CRMLS spells this out in its own Common Interest documentation: “Condominium” applies when the owner “received title primarily to a cube of airspace without receiving undivided ownership of any underlying land,” while “Planned Development” ownership “includes an individual interest in a parcel of land, usually a subdivision lot, and the structural improvements situated on the lot.” REcolorado publishes the same split in its customer handout.

So property type alone can’t tell you what you’re buying. Subtype can.

What Are the Nine Standard MLS Property Types?

The nine values RESO defines for PropertyType, with the share of reporting organizations implementing each.

These percentages measure how many RESO reporting MLSs implement a value, not how many listings carry it. Land at 93% doesn’t mean 93% of listings are lots.

Residential Income is the one that trips people up. The 2 to 4 unit framing is how MLSs use the field, not something RESO defines. OneKey MLS documents Residential Income as covering “multi-family 2-4.” CVR MLS draws the same line under a different label, calling its category Residential Multi-Family, “2, 3 or 4 unit.” RESO publishes no unit count.

What Are the 31 Standard Property Subtypes?

The full standard list, in RESO’s own alphabetical order, with each value’s adoption share per RESO Data Dictionary 2.0.

Your own MLS may show values that aren’t on this list at all. That’s normal, and it’s covered below.

Why Doesn’t Land Have a Property Subtype?

Because the standard never scoped the field to it. RESO’s PropertySubType page carries an applicability row listing exactly six PropertyType values: Residential, Residential Lease, Manufactured In Park, Commercial Sale, Commercial Lease, and Business Opportunity. Nine values minus six leaves three left out.

Land is one. Farm and Residential Income are the other two.

So when a vacant lot is entered as PropertyType Land (93% adoption), there is no subtype value to fill in. Nothing is missing. The field doesn’t apply, by design rather than by oversight. OneKey MLS shows the same thing: its property type table prints “n/a” in the subtype column for Land.

Farm creates a real wrinkle. It’s both a top-level PropertyType value and one of the 31 subtype values. A listing can carry PropertyType Farm with no subtype, or PropertySubType Farm inside another class.

This is where the standard stops being the whole story. OneKey MLS attaches Duplex, Triplex, and Quadruplex as subtypes of Residential Income in its own Matrix system, even though RESO does not scope PropertySubType to Residential Income at all. The standard says one thing, a real operating MLS does another. CRMLS does something similar on the value side, adding Loft, Studio, and a mixed-use “Commercial/Residential” type in its subtype definitions, none of them in RESO’s 31.

Go check this today: pull up a vacant-lot listing in your own MLS and look at the subtype field. If it’s blank or reads “n/a,” you now know why. Then pull up a 2 unit listing and see whether your MLS gives it a subtype. That tells you how closely your board follows the standard.

Six Residential Property Categories, Type by Type

Now the categories, with what the MLS stores for each.

Single-Family Homes

PropertyType Residential, PropertySubType Single Family Residence (56% adoption). Ownership is fee simple, structure and land together. Financing sits inside the 1 to 4 unit category Fannie Mae’s Selling Guide B2-3-01 defines.

Fannie Mae’s 97% loan-to-value options go to eligible borrowers on a 1-unit principal residence, and 97% LTV means the borrower brings the other 3%. A VA-backed purchase loan can require no down payment at all. And a listing marked Cabin (8% adoption) is still single-family, but RESO says it “may have limited utilities.”

Condominiums

PropertyType Residential, PropertySubType Condominium (79% adoption, the most-implemented subtype of all). Ownership runs unit by unit: per CRMLS’s Common Interest definitions you take title to a cube of airspace, not the land underneath. Financing still sits in the residential 1 to 4 unit category, but a condo also goes through a project-level eligibility review of the building itself, on top of the review of the buyer. Related but distinct: Stock Cooperative (10%) is RESO’s term for a co-op.

Townhouses

PropertyType Residential, PropertySubType Townhouse (60% adoption). Ownership is typically fee simple, including the land beneath the structure, the contrast covered above. Financing follows the same 1 to 4 unit rules as single-family.

📌 Pro Tip: Shared walls don’t make a property a condo. Architecture and ownership are two different questions, and the MLS answers them in two different fields.

Multi-Family Properties

This is where the unit count changes more than your listing. A building with 2 to 4 units is usually entered as PropertyType Residential Income (no subtype under the standard) or Residential, and it sits inside Fannie Mae’s residential purchase eligibility. The Selling Guide is direct: the GSE “purchases or securitizes first-lien mortgages that are secured by residential properties when the dwelling consists of one to four units.” A five-unit building falls outside that, and MLSs classify those listings as Commercial Sale or Commercial Lease. Fannie Mae writes the rule in terms of unit count and states no occupancy exception to it.

Real MLSs draw the same line in their own rulebooks. CRMLS defines Commercial Sale as covering “multi-family properties comprised of 5 or more units,” and OneKey MLS pairs Residential Income at “multi-family 2-4” against Commercial Sale at “multi-family 5+.” An ADU does not change the count: Fannie Mae treats a one-unit property with an accessory dwelling unit as one unit.

Manufactured and Mobile Homes

The two words aren’t interchangeable, and RESO keeps them as separate values. Manufactured Home (30% adoption) is factory-built housing meeting the federal HUD code, which took effect June 15, 1976 per 24 CFR Part 3282. Mobile Home (36%) is RESO’s value for a factory-built house that “retains axles and was built prior to June 15, 1976.” Manufactured On Land (6%) sells with the land. CRMLS draws the line at land ownership: PropertyType is Manufactured In Park (6%) when the home sits on a leased site, Residential when owned land is included in the sale.

Land

PropertyType Land, no PropertySubType, for the reason covered above. Raw land isn’t backed by the standard residential programs Fannie Mae and the VA run, so lenders set their own down payment and terms against unimproved collateral. There is no single national figure to quote. Worth checking: the subtype Unimproved Land (38% adoption) is a different thing, scoped by RESO to the commercial side.

How Matrix, Flexmls, and Paragon Show These Fields

Matrix, Flexmls, and Paragon are three of the platforms MLSs run their listing systems on. OneKey MLS, for one, documents its property type and subtype picklists in Matrix. The screens and the labels differ from board to board, and the fields underneath are usually the same RESO-standard PropertyType and PropertySubType, though plenty of MLSs add their own values on top, as OneKey and CRMLS do.

Zillow and Realtor.com are consumer search sites, not MLS platforms. PropertyType and PropertySubType live in the MLS system your board runs, which is where the value gets entered.

Go check this today: log in to your own MLS and open a blank listing input form. Whichever platform your board runs, property type and property subtype sit near the top, usually the first two things you pick. Then open the search form and look at the first two filters. Same fields, other direction.

Searching and Filtering Listings by Property Subtype

Filtering on PropertyType alone gives you everything underneath it. Ask for Residential and you get houses, condos, townhouses, and cabins in one list. Filtering on PropertySubType narrows it to the style you want.

Before you can query either field programmatically you need MLS or board-approved API access, and the fees vary by board, so it’s worth knowing what MLS access costs first. On a WordPress site pulling listings through the RESO Web API rather than a hosted iframe, both fields arrive as ordinary property content, so a theme’s own search and filter widgets can query them the way they query price or bedroom count.

Querying PropertySubType in the RESO Web API

Both fields are documented as “String List, Single” in RESO’s field metadata, so each listing carries one value per field rather than a collection. RESO’s own Web API examples page publishes a working OData filter against a live endpoint, and it uses PropertyType:

GET https://api.bridgedataoutput.com/api/v2/OData/mlspin/Properties
  ?$filter=BedroomsTotal lt 5
  and (City eq 'Boston')
  and (PropertyType has PropertyEnums.PropertyType'Residential')
  &$top=10

Being precise about scope: that documented example filters on PropertyType, not PropertySubType. Because both fields share the same metadata shape, the same syntax would be expected to work for PropertySubType, but that is an inference from RESO’s PropertyType example, not a documented one. Test it against your own feed, and check the list of supported MLSs for your board.

Where MLS Import Fits In

Full disclosure, this is our product. MLS Import plugin overview covers the whole thing, but the short version: it pulls these same RESO-standard fields into WordPress through the RESO Web API, so your own property pages and search can use PropertyType and PropertySubType the way Matrix and Flexmls do.

MLS Import pricing is $49/mo, or $504/yr ($42/mo billed annually). The honest limit: one connection serves one MLS per site. If you need two feeds, you run two site setups.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does property subtype mean?

It means the specific style of property a listing describes, one level below the broader property type. The MLS field is called PropertySubType, and RESO’s Data Dictionary defines 31 standard values for it.

What is a property subtype?

It is one of two classification fields on almost every MLS listing sheet. Property type answers what class the listing sits in; property subtype answers what it is inside that class. Around 95% of RESO-reporting organizations implement it.

What is the difference between property type and property subtype?

Property type is the broad class, with nine standard values. Property subtype is the specific style inside it, with 31. And subtype applies to only six of the nine types, so Land, Farm, and Residential Income listings carry none.

What are the MLS property types?

RESO’s Data Dictionary defines nine: Residential, Residential Income, Residential Lease, Commercial Sale, Commercial Lease, Land, Farm, Manufactured In Park, and Business Opportunity. Residential is the most widely implemented at 98% of reporting organizations, Land second at 93%.

Why does a vacant land listing have no subtype?

Because RESO scopes PropertySubType to six property types, and Land is not one of them. Farm and Residential Income are the other two excluded values. A blank subtype on a vacant lot is the standard working as designed, not missing data.

What is the difference between property subtype and structure type?

Both are RESO Data Dictionary fields, and they answer different questions. Subtype describes what the buyer is getting: Condominium, Townhouse, Single Family Residence. StructureType describes the physical form of the building, so a Condominium subtype can carry a low-rise or high-rise structure type. REcolorado lays the two out side by side.

How do I compare listing options for different property types?

Filter on subtype, not just type, or you will get condos and townhouses mixed in the same results. Start with property type to set the class, then add the subtype you want. On a WordPress site running MLS Import, both fields import as regular property data your search widgets can filter on.

Bringing It All Together

The distinction is smaller than it looks and more useful than it sounds. Property type is the class a listing belongs to. Property subtype is what it is inside that class. The two aren’t interchangeable, and when a subtype field comes up blank, check whether the listing is Land, Farm, or Residential Income before assuming someone forgot to fill it in.

Does your MLS use values that aren’t in RESO’s 31? Tell us in the comments, we would like to see how far the local lists have drifted.