Searching for Long Island waterfront homes on MLS for an upcoming post about where these homes are located, and what price ranges they fall in to, resulted in a very disturbing discovery.  It seems that no matter which direction I turn lately, I seem to find unscrupulous agents and brokers that practice deception when marketing their listings.  This is true in many ways, but today's discovery only lends credence to the mistrust that many have of REALTORS® in general.

For those of you that are not familiar with Long Island, the name (Long Island) accurately describes our geography.   While Long Island is much longer than it is wide, it is not so narrow that all of the homes are waterfront property.  Being a native Long Islander that has lived and worked in several places on the Island, I am knowledgeable about the areas that are near the water on both the north and south shores.  I also know which towns are situated in the middle of the island.

As I spent quite a bit of time doing research for the upcoming Long Island waterfront homes post, I kept coming across homes that most certainly could not be considered "waterfront" without telling a blatant lie.  In some cases, the listing agent could get away with using the term "waterfront" because the home is in a community with man-made ponds.  However, all waterfront is not created equally; some waterfront is considered very desirable, while other waterfront is more of a technicality because there is a small pond, or shallow creek running behind the home.

Our MLS recently made vast improvements to the mapping system by changing over to Microsoft Virtual Earth.  With the click of a mouse, you can zoom in to most neighborhoods and get a fairly close "bird's eye" view.  As I came across towns that are nowhere near the water, I used this tool to find that the only water that many of these homes were in front of were swimming pools, and not even that much in some cases.

You can imagine how someone searching for waterfront homes would feel if they were unfamiliar with a particular area, and they arrived to find no water anywhere in the vicinity of the home.  This is a terrible trick that some agents are using to get their listings to show up in more MLS searches.  It is also very short-sighted, not to mention, totally unethical. 

Who benefits from this kind of blatant deception?  As far as I can tell, the only one that has anything to gain by using this technique is the listing agent that can show homeowners that they are generating traffic to the home.  The problem is that it is artificial traffic that will NEVER produce an actual buyer.

Who gets hurt by this kind of blatant deception?  A lot of people...buyers who waste their time going to see these homes under false pretenses, sellers who receive angry buyers and agents to their homes, agents that waste their valuable time seeing a home that should never have come up in the search to begin with, and the real estate profession as a whole due to guilt by association.

We, as REALTORS®, are required to take ethics courses to maintain our good standing with the NAR (National Association of REALTORS).  Unfortunately, it seems that a number of REALTORS® take no stock in the lessons learned from these ethics courses, and continue to act in a dishonest way instead of working to improve the overall image of our profession.