San Francisco Schtuff

By Anna M. Hibble

Not really a news flash to say that Realtors battle a “bad reputation,” oft competing with  used car salespeople, politicians, and lawyers as those the general public is most likely to let drown/choke/walk in front of a speeding bus. The FrontSteps has even held polls: Who’s worse, Realtors or Politicians? Visit the blog to vote. Certainly, all professional have their share of a-holes, real estate included; on the other hand, plenty of honest, straight forward, and truly caring individuals help us buy ans sell houses in the Bay Area. So how did the “bad reputation” begin?

One issue that plagues the industry is that of forthrightness, of rather, a dearth thereof. Why, for instance, is information on the actual sales price of a home so hard to get? Schtuff tried to make those prices public once and was chastised; the information is now only available through a complicated set of steps in which you, consumer, must make myriad promises to uphold the top secret integrity of the transaction by which you gain the information. In true Stephen Colbert style, tip of the hat to Home San Francisco for thinking of a legal way to give these data to the public; wag of the finger though to the NAR, that keeps such info–that people really need to be able to be intelligent players in the game of real estate–under lock and key.

Another area of what appears to we, the non-agent public, to be subterfuge is “re-listing.” The practice of pulling an aged listing off market, changing its price, and putting it back on the market as new corrupts our efforts to track price reductions, days on the market, comps, etc. Though I suppose that technically, a listing that goes off market and comes back on later is a “new” listing, hiding the history of the property seems underhanded. And potential clients aren’t the only ones questioning the practice of re-listing. Inman reports the following:

Some multiple listing service participants have taken advantage of MLS rules and policies … to draw extra attention to properties listed with them,” and listing brokers and agents sometimes re-list the same properties multiple times, causing those properties to appear as “new” listings over and over. In these cases, “While the listing contract is technically ‘new,’ ” each time “the relationship between the seller and the listing broker is ongoing and continuous, and the listed property — in the eyes of reasonable consumers — is certainly not ‘new’ to the market.

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