By now, most people are beginning to suspect that something is amiss in the real estate market, because it’s impossible to escape the daily barrage of articles in newspapers, on the Internet, and even the alarming reporting now being done on television. Almost all of this recent coverage is negative, unless someone who makes a living from the housing machine is the one being quoted.
If you dig even deeper, you’ll find that many local real estate agents have either sold off their own property holdings, or are trying to do so now. We’ll leave the debate about whether the housing market is deteriorating, or if home prices are really declining in Southern Maryland for another day, but in this letter I would like to educate the home-buying public about a frequent, and unsavory practice that is being used both locally and nationally to separate the fool from his money. However, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why if the housing market is so great, that you would need to do these things. What happened to the panicked buying and multiple bids of recent years?
The practice that I would like to draw attention to here is the process of making homes that have been for sale for quite some time appear as if they were just put on the market. Real estate agents protect their sales commissions by selling homes for the highest price possible, and unfortunately some of these sales people are willing to use any means available to sell houses. Most people already know this, but in case I have any younger readers, I’ll briefly describe what is known as the Multiple Listing Service or MLS as it is more commonly known.
The MLS is the equivalent of a private, real estate agent only, database of classified ads, that is controlled exclusively by the real estate industry. Each time a home is listed for sale, it is assigned a MLS number to keep track of it. An example of an MLS number would be SM6218316. Before we continue, it’s important that you understand some common abbreviations used in the MLS by the real estate industry. These important terms are Days on the Market, or DOMM, and Days on the Market Property, or DOMP. DOMM refers to how many days a property has been on the market with its current MLS number (Yes, unbelievably, they keep getting new numbers). DOMP refers to the total amount of days that a property has been on the market. Under the supposed rules of our regional MLS, the DOMP of a property cannot be reset to zero unless the home has been completely removed from the market for 6 months. Real estate agents rarely ever mention the DOMP number to Buyers, and there’s a reason for that.
To get an understanding of how these terms come into play, we will examine a local property that is currently on the market by the Lands End Properties Agency: 29255 Kuhn Lane, Mechanicsville, Md 20659 This newly constructed home by Branchwood Construction started out in the MLS as listing number SM6094479 on 19 June, 2006 with a sales price of $525,000. The trickery with this home began right off the bat, because when the listing was created in the MLS database, a Maryland Tax Identification number for the property was never assigned to the listing. The listing agent simply entered XX-OOO-XXXXXX as the Tax ID. The home was for sale as this MLS number for 47 days.
After not selling by 05 August, 2006, the home was withdrawn from the market and then re-listed as MLS number SM6147351 for $499,000. Being that the house never had a Tax ID entered into the MLS, the DOMM and DOMP are both reset to zero each time a new listing number is created for this house, which can potentially trick a prospective buyer into thinking that the property had just come up for sale. The house had this MLS number assigned to it until