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Hey Professionals, what's up with fraudulently listing the square footage of the lot as the square footage of the house?
When I do searches on Zillow I'm looking for a square footage range (lot size is nice but less important to me). I imagine millions of others like to tailor their search criteria in similar ways, and there are a lot of options to do so, to weed out properties they find acceptable to their wants/needs from those properties which don't match their criteria.
So why the abundance of innacurate listings? Certainly it's not difficult to get the square footage of the house if you're the listing agent. Indeed it's your job to do so. So why be misleading? As a customer I'm not willing to do business with people who list things fraudulently, and this obviously affects sales. I certainly wouldn't want my listing agent overinflating the square footage of my home on the MLS because the truth comes out in the end and a lot of time is wasted.
Lets see some examples:
Real Estate agent Gina Gargeu from Maryland seems to be particularly zealous about this tactic, though I am by no means picking on her alone. One of her listings just so happened to be the final straw that broke my camel's back so I decided to click on her Zillow profile to check out some other listings. I was not surprised by what I found as there are at least a dozen of her listings that list homes in this manner, and there are hundreds of other listings like this by others which do the same (and that's just in my LOCAL area, there must be hundreds of thousands nationwide).
Either this is done as a gimic (which is wrong and constitutes fraud / false advertisement in my eyes) or it's done out of ignorance and lack of proper training in using the listing services. I'm leaning toward it being a gimic given how obnoxiously prevalent this tactic has become. This cannot simply be attributed to a mistake or two here and there. I've also noticed this tactic in the time I've been shopping for a home become an increasing trend.
And given that it's an increasing trend I've forced to wonder: Do you "professionals" take classes in this garbage or what? Must be hilarious during class time, and I'll bet both the instructors and class takers must think this is a legitimate tactic or that it somehow works rather than ultimately turning people away. Just another reason why the industry's credibility as a whole is becoming tarnished (one reason out of many).
Please police up your own problem makers because your problem causers blemish the good agents as well.
As you have illustrated, if this was a tactic, it would be a pretty stupid tactic, as it only annoys people and makes listings show up in the wrong search, or fail to show up in the right search. No one wants that, particularly not the listing agent.
So I would suspect it is a mistake, not a tactic.
Whose mistake? I would suspect Zillow. Zillow is not on the MLS, they skim all their information from other sites, and their software doesn't always pull the information correctly. Zillow is wrong or out of date so often, I honestly don't understand why people use them.
My MLS listings get fed to Zillow directly to try and avoid data errors. When I used ListHub it did all sorts of weird things to the data and I had to constantly go in and manually correct it. My guess is that her brokerage uses a third party service to feed the data to Zillow and it is transposing the data. Since I have personally experienced that before, I know it happens.
Hey Professionals, what's up with fraudulently listing the square footage of the lot as the square footage of the house?
all 3 of these listings have "accurate" sq ft listed in the mls, so the disconnect is on zillows end. they are also foreclosures, so the listing agent has limited information to start with
When you click on the "data source" link, it does show that the tax assessor's sq. ft which looks more realistic. I emailed that agent to let her know of the discrepancy. Keep in mind that Zillow and other public portals are advertising websites designed to sell advertising and marketing solutions, not houses!
Zillow is a feed. Agents don't list directly on the zillow site so I suspect it's a feed issue and not a fraudulent trick. I'd be surprised if the agent was even aware of the issue. If you want accurate information don't shop on Zillow. Hire an agent and have them set you up directly on MLS.
Disclaimer-I didn't even click the link because I don't really care enough to spend any more time on the issue. I only responded to stand up for the profession since Zillow is "our" site and "we" don't list on it directly. Yet another reason why I'm not a fan of syndication. We get blamed for other people's mistakes.
I have seen FSBOs on Zillow with inflated square footage. Makes the $/sf look real attractive. Ticks me off that consumers think they can trick other consumers without our help. Leave the fraud to the professionals. We have experience.
Listing agents must not care. I've seen many errors in listings. I saw one home listed as a single family. It was half a duplex 1/1 and said it was 900 sq ft. Turns out it's only 640 sq ft according to the county tax info and the rest of the area is an enclosed porch but it's not under air, so it's not considered part of the home square footage.
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