On a historical level, this incredibly extensive archive of over two thousand multi-service listing (MLS) cards is an important record of the post war housing boom in the San Francisco Bay area, offering an essential historic reference to architectural styles, sizes and prices for mid-century homes, apartments and businesses. On a visual level, it is a wonderfully deadpan, proto-conceptual photographic survey of a changing California, crafted a decade before Ruscha would turn “every building” into art.

The collection contains over 2000 MLS cards and almost 1800 of those have a photograph showing the listed property. These MLS cards track the housing styles from Queen Anne Victorians which survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire to California Spanish Revival; sleek Streamline Art Deco Homes to French Provincial and Tudor Revival, with the majority of the collection focused within San Francisco's 49 square miles at the tip of the peninsula. Bay area locations represented include Sunset; South San Francisco; Marina; West Addition; Visitacion Valley/Bayview; Upper Market; Ocean; Inner Mission; Outer Mission; Haight-Ashbury; North/South of Market; Richmond; North Beach; Parkside; West of Twin Peaks; Daly City and San Mateo. The photographs were taken by Stan Jabin, a Bay Area commercial real estate photographer.

The 1906 destruction encompassed most of what today are the Financial District, North Beach, Russian Hill, South of Market, and Northern Mission District with other occasional pockets. After the Twin Peaks Tunnel opened in 1918 linking downtown San Francisco to the largely vacant areas of the southern Sunset District and Parkside, developers flocked to the area, and so did buyers. As depicted in the 222 photo-card listings in this archive, popular facade styles focused on Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean, with small sprinkles of Streamline Moderne and Storybook Fantasy Tudor Revival styles.

Of particular interest are the 92 photo-card listings for Western Addition just prior to where this predominantly African-American and Japanese-American community was subjected to redevelopment destruction in order to resolve the area of "urban blight," so many of the homes and businesses did not survive the urban renewal launched just a few years later. The neighborhood before World War II had housed large numbers of Japanese-Americans, as well as half the total San Francisco Black population. Following the illegal Japanese Internment acts, and the desperate need for housing brought on by Black residents pouring in for wartime work, a significant segment of the empty apartments, buildings, and homes were converted. Considerable sections of Western Addition including large portions of Geary and Fillmore were demolished for the Geary Expressway, and other streets, which largely destroyed the neighborhood.

Also included are 208 cards for "Out of Town" listings for suburb areas in Sonoma, Marin, and as far East as the Sierras. Many of these are former summer homes, vacation cabins, entire motoring hotels, and auto camps being converted from their previous purpose into housing tracts for fast growing populations.

The business subscription concept of MLS regional real estate networks of properties for sale and rent had originated in California, with the first such association introduced into San Diego in 1885, and then spreading to other areas such as Cleveland and Chicago until the Great Depression. In 1951, the California Real Estate Association (CREA) introduced the system of a new photo service in conjunction with the MLS of SF, Inc. real estate night course, and these regional brokers were the first to print photographs as seen in the present collection.