The Silliest Realtor Game In Town

I believe that different regions may have varying standards and what is traditional and acceptable in one region may not be in another.

Our MLS system in Belmont (San Mateo County) decided this year to disallow the practice of re-listing a home (effectively re-setting the DOM stat) since consumers thought it was a deceptive practice-and to some degree I suppose some agents employed this practice inappropriately.

One of the first questions we receive at an open house from prospective buyers is how long a home has been on the market; and of course we tell them from the date it was originally listed; and we also tell them how long it has been on the market after any price reductions. Home buyers judge in our area if a home is overpriced if it's still on the market after 21 days. Clearly more and more buyers are relying on this statistic and the Internet for information to help them in buying a home.

When the MLS systems decided to share our proprietary database with the public over the Internet, we applauded that move as a way to reach more prospective buyers. To some degree however the public now perceives this iinformation as their right to view and are beginning to demand if not try and dictate what information should be made available. We've even received consumer complaints about erroneous advertising of third party web sites which extract the MLS information and misrepresent it when they launch it on their web page; this is can probably be traced back to their spiders getting iinformation and simply displaying it incorrectly.

In the Bay Area agents used to put a home in as a new listing when the seller would make a price reduction not in an effort to fool the public-but in an effort to get more agents to see the home. Remember, before the Internet the public never had access to that information unless it was filtered through an agent. And of course agents are duty bound to tell their prospective buyer the listing's history-just as they would divulge the sales history.

Some agents tend to show recently listed homes for sale and forget about the ones which have been on the market awhile and this was a good way to get their attention--it was a "tool" to get your seller's listing back in front of agents, not trick the public. Any savvy agent would see the new listing show up on their hot sheet and realize it was a home they'd already seen but it got the listing back in front of the agents at a new price; agents who had never seen the home often did so after it was re-listed (perhaps simply because it now fell within their buyer's price range). It was the way our board chose to handle it at the time and it was an acceptable and provided for practice--back  then.

Anecdotal case in point; we were recently asked to take over a listing in Belmont from another agent when the seller was dissatisfied with the service they were receiving. That agent had the home on the market for 14 days. When we re-listed the home (at effectively the same price), because it was with a different broker, the Days on Market stat reset automatically. Even though our board now tracks and reports CDOM (publicly) our first agent tour came along and about 50 agents showed up (that's a lot in our area)-only one mentioned that they had seen it before.

The way in which the days-on-market stat was recorded was an not an intentionally misleading practice in and of itself, but one can see how the public-which has come to rely on Internet as their source for home information-would miss the true facts without the guidance of an agent.

Say, another good reason to work with an agent...