Sound Off! Tell us WHY we need addresses in our home searches! (Huntsville: sales, real estate)

[Seth Parker]

Now, I know that with enough work, you can actually run down most, if not all addresses in your home searches. I'm hoping to make this a little bit easier for everyone by pushing our MLS membership to actively display addresses on every listing.

This has probably been the most frustrating thing I've encountered in all the years I've been a Realtor. NOW IS THE TIME TO CHANGE THIS, but I NEED YOUR HELP. I need YOU to voice YOUR opinions below so that I may present this to the membership in an effort to help Realtors realize that we need to display addresses.

All I ask is that you be honest. I'm taking these comments directly to the membership. Tell them WHY we should have addresses. Tell them WHY it would make YOUR life easier. Tell them WHY it would be beneficial to Realtors to do this. I've already done all of this, but YOU speaking your mind will have more influence. But overall, just tell them we need addresses!

I have a form on my site for this, but Keeper would probably slap my wrist for posting it .

Anyway, if you can just comment, and then sign it "First Name - City, State" I will greatly appreciate it!

[AnotherBravesFan]

For someone like me relocating from out of the area, the lack of an address on a listing slows down the search process and wastes not only my time but the listing agent's. While I try to write all over my map the names of subdivisions when I find them out (and a little rating or description), it has taken me many months of diligent work, plus a couple of plane trips to the area to fill in only a portion of them in my target areas (Harvest, Madison, and Monrovia). So the current system with only the subdivision name is not that helpful for most people. I mean, who can remember where all these neighborhoods are?

I do have a buyer's agent with a search set up that emails me new listings in designated areas that fit my criteria, so that gives me addresses. But that search program sometimes misses listings it should be sending me. Also, because I have found so few homes that I really like, I often have searched the MLS on my own in other neighborhoods. I hate to email/call my agent every time I see something that might/might not work.

Plus, I will not consider a home with an East-West orientation or one that is on or backs to a busy road.

So many times, I'd see a house that looked interesting, but without the address, I don't know whether it is truly worth pursuing without emailing the listing agent, only to wait a day or two (or forever) for them to get back to me with the exact location, which turns out to be unsuitable. If I had known the address from the start, I wouldn't have wasted my time or the agent's with a request for the full listing.

Hope that helps,

Angie - San Diego, CA (soon to be Harvest, AL )

[Seth Parker]

Thank you, yes it will help. The people I have to convince are the Realtors. The MLS membership has voted to pass the measure at least twice before, but the Realtors have voted it down. All I have to do is convince more than 50% of people voting that it's in their best interest to have addresses shown publicly.

I think that this may be the best way to do it. That way, the frustration is being shown from the people we are supposed to be here to help.

[ionlife]

The lack of addresses made it very hard for me to locate the place on a map relative to where I wanted to live. For instance, Edgewater was in the Bob Jones School district for Madison, but I had no idea that it was located south of 565. When I finally saw it, and yes it was lovely, it was not the location I desired as it was too far away from the schools for my daughter. Distance to travel to the schools was a must know for me as I wanted to cut my school commute. It was easier to determine where houses were located if I looked at new subdivisions and developments online. Therefore, I steered away from MLS and homes in existing, established developments. It wasn't till we arrived to scope out the lay of the land that we found out where a lot of those subdivisions were located.

Once I determined, for sure, the school district I wanted to live in, it became easier. I just clicked on the MLS schools link and checked that to make sure Liberty was the MS feeding into Bob Jones. In the end, I purchased a home that I found in the new subdivisions guide. Maybe I was led to do it due to ease of discovery.

[zenjenn]

Oh this was a HUGE pet peeve of ours when looking for the house. We'd look at listings that seemed of interest, write them all down, only to talk to our agent and find out that these houses are houses we wouldn't have considered in a million years because of issues we care about such as; they were right on a busy street, they backed up to a road in the backyard, they were at an intersection, etc. All we did was WASTE our time and our real estate agent's time.

And I'm not sure what the benefit was from the listing agent's perspective. We never, ever, ever contacted the listing agent. We always contacted our own agent. Even if for some reason we had contacted the listing agent, we would have just wasted his or her time too, because these are houses we would not have purchased under any circumstance due to being on a busy street or whathaveyou.

Also NOT having addresses would make us NOT look at houses. There were times when we didn't want to be under our agent's nose, and we'd drive around looking at houses with signs in front from the outside. If we had been able to acquire addresses from MLS, we would have driven by those houses too. No address=no exposure to us, and instead we looked at houses that we randomly drove by.

If I'm the buyer, I know what I want. I know what I don't want. Stupid little MLS tricks like not having an address listed just pisses me off and makes me waste my time and furthers my impression of the real estate profession being a bit smarmy. Stuff like this makes me want to never deal with a real estate agent again. I want listings straight. In California, you can list an address but it was optional, and I would flat-out ignore listings without addresses, and when I sought representation from a selling agent, I refused to hire anyone that used this tactic of not listing the address.

Searching for a house is exhausting and time-consuming enough without having to waste my time unnecessarily. It's disrespectful to buyers.

Jennifer
Huntsville, AL

[Huntsville82]

To be completely honest, it should list the address so that I won't continually have to bug the real estate agent. It is in their best interest to show the address for a more informed consumer. Who are they thinking they are fooling by 'not' showing it? I'm certainly not going to drive out there and see it without knowing it, anyway.

[MadHaus]

I totally agree with everything ZenJenn wrote. One would think that the Realtors would not want to waste either their time or costly gasoline on driving folks around to see houses that could have easily been eliminated by doing a map search of the address.

M.H.
Madison and B'ham, AL

[guxu]

Also, unlike other areas, they do not like to list the total sq ft in their listings.

[DvlsAdvc8]

Addresses are CRITICAL to me because I use various map tools to find houses I'd be interested in. Sharing data and having an address allows me to pull up a map and see all the houses on the map in the areas I'm looking at. I absolutely HATE waiting for my Realtor to send me houses I *might* be interested in. I'd rather save everyone time and do that myself, then pass those on to my Realtor as houses I'd like to go take a look at.

Further, for relocatees who can't make it to Huntsville to look at houses yet, addresses are a HUGE help in locating homes on Google street view. You can wander a neighborhood virtually and see if its a good candidate.

We can all get this information anyway, its just a pain in the butt to do it. You don't do well as an industry by making life for your customers a pain. No one I know chooses a realtor because of a listing they have. You choose someone that came recommended or after talking to a few. Personally, in my current homebuying search, I've been taking note of the Realtors who don't provide complete information (ie address, sq footage) or who provide inaccurate info (saying a house is in X neighborhood when its really not, but they want the "cachet" that the nearby neighborhood has) and use that to help eliminate Realtors with whom I will work.

It also drives me crazy that Huntsville doesn't seem to report actual sales data. In most places, you can go on Trulia.com or the like and pull up recent home sales in the neighborhoods you're looking to buy and that helps you determine real prices... both when buying and when selling a home.

This is basic information that can be found from many sources, I'm not sure what Realtors hope to gain by keeping it locked up, other than frustrating prospective clients.

[ionlife]

I know--I miss the sales data as well...