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Can it be a good idea to take one's house off the market for a month or two (during slow winter time) to reset the number of days it's been on the market? As some folks question why a property hasn't sold... (properties in rural NM tend to me on a very long time).
I don't know about all of the MLS's across the country, but in the MLS with which I am familiar, it's VERY easy to see the history of the house and that it was previously listed for a certain number of days. This information was always communicated to clients. These kinds of "games" kind of irritated me as they were/are easy to see through.
You need to check and see how your local multiple does it. Locally, the house won't show as a new listing until it has been off the market for more than six months. There is no point in taking your property off the market for two months if there is nothing to be gained by it.
Taking the house off the market to hide the extended period of time it has been on the market, is like not keeping a running balance in your checkbook, to avoid seeing how little money you have.
You will do better to figure-out why the house has remained on the market for so long, and take action to correct that. The most likely reason is that it is over-priced for your particular market.
A lot of people take their houses off the market for holidays & sometimes wait until spring to relist them so keeping yours on the market will mean less competition since there are typically less homes on the market at this time....Buyers at this time of year also tend to be more serious crowd than the see-every-house-that's-listed-before-making-a-decision crowd in the summer.
I also agree with jghorton that you should figure out why it hasn't sold and make corrections....Ask your agent what feedback they received from the other agents & their buyers...
When ours was listed and had an offer within three days and then sat in escrow after people didn't qualify and we had an extension that eventually fell through our house was counted as being listed for two months. All but three days it was under contract. I was concerned that we were considered old and the agent said that MLS tells people exactly what happened so they would know we were not a stale listing.
That apparently didn't get passed on because we started getting lowball offers and the "specialist" from their office came out to tell me that our house had not gotten any interest in two months and he would show us all the ways we could waste our money and sell for an extreme loss. He bragged of how he had walked away from his house and no one should ever expect to make any money on a house.
He wanted to play the game of taking it off the market for one day and put it back on as a new listing and said he planned to do that every week.
I asked him if he was even aware that our house had been under contract for two months and not on the market as they did not continue to show it or take any back up offers. He said it didn't matter that we were under contract, that days on the market just showed no one had wanted our house in two months. I had to shake my head at that and felt at the time we should have pulled the listing but he told us some things their company would do for us and we decided to let it ride a week and see what he did.
Offer number two came in that week and it wasn't quite as good as the first one but we went with it. His games eventually lost us that contract as well and by then our listing was up.
Two months after the listing was up we started hearing from agents who were quite insulting about our house not selling and they specialized in hard to sell properties. So the agents do not update the MLS information because the couple of them I talked with were not aware our house had been under contract twice and they thought the listing date was up that week rather than two months before that.
So while I was quite concerned with the days on the market thing I saw that the whole thing was a game. You are probably just as well off to stay on the market because they won't pay any attention to the MLS information anyway.
Why do people get their knickers in a twist about how long a house has been on the market? All it means is that the right buyer hasn't come along yet. Sometimes we overthink things.
I wouldn't bother, at least, not in this area. Check your local MLS, but around here, it's literally one click to reveal the entire listing and selling history of a house for the last 7 years. Taking it off won't practically "reset" anything.
Why do people get their knickers in a twist about how long a house has been on the market? All it means is that the right buyer hasn't come along yet. Sometimes we overthink things.
Or perhaps they are not overthinking it.
Anyone playing fast and loose with information pertaining to a house, in this case the DOM, can cause that information to be construed as misleading and, potentially, as attempted fraud.
As a minimum, buyer's agents should review the listing history of every home they recommend to a buyer and should also review the listing history of the comps they use for their CMA.
For those using a mortgage to finance their home purchase, lenders require listing history information. Appraisers MUST report the listing history of the subject property (the property being sold/bought) for the preceding THREE years from the date of their site inspection of the property. That includes the record of EVERY MLS change that occurs with that property during that three year period.
It is much better to find out early when someone is playing with the DOM data (or any other material fact pertaining to a listing) than to find out later.
EDIT: An afterthought-- we've also seen where some agents have canceled an MLS listing after many weeks or months on the market and then relisted the same property using the builder's lot number and street address instead of the original USPS address. Another attempt to mislead and not a practice embraced by many as being ethical.
HTH
Last edited by TexasDillo; 12-28-2014 at 10:01 PM..
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