Carol Lloyd of SFGgate.com has written an insightful piece on relisting of MLS homes and what impact that practice has on those that rely on MLS data. "Taken together, thousands of agents relisting properties to make them seem new obfuscates all sorts of important information -- including price reductions, how many real estate agents have tried to sell a given house and how long the house has really been on the market."
Why would an agent relist a property? "Most agents sign up for e-mail or conduct daily searches that alert them to new listings, so it's easy for old listings to simply fall off the agent radar. One veteran San Francisco real estate agent once told me that listings in the city go stale after only a couple of weeks. Buyer's agents stop bringing their clients to see them and -- voilà! -- you've got the perfect microclimate for bottom-feeders. So it's not surprising that in the current market, when there aren't as many buyers, no listing agent wants to get caught with something Sfnewsletter.com has taken to calling "stale fish."
But what's a beleaguered listing agent to do? The secret for many has been to use an old trade secret known as relisting -- the real estate equivalent to turning the odometer back to zero.
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