Phoenix MLS Days on Market Survey
Posted on May 26th, 2007 by Jonathan Dalton
While suffering during the 165-minute fiasco that is Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End (which frighteningly enough had an ending that could indicate yet another chapter in a dying franchise), I received a most interesting e-mail.
The President of the Arizona Regional MLS, Abe Schwarz, has requested that I send a blast email to Phoenix Association members to survey each of you on your feelings about the Days on Market information in the MLS.
One of the ideas floated in the e-mail was removing days on market from the Ageny Property Report, instead having the information readily available on an Archive or other some such report. Not a bad idea, to my mind - not as good as eliminating days on market altogether, but not bad.
There was a free-form section at the bottom and I kept my remarks purposefully brief. But the gist of my complaint with days on market boil down to two basic points:
1) The days on market do not constitute a material fact about the house. Aside from any issues about the home, they also could be indicative of the marketing, the agent’s effort to sell, pricing and/or the sellers’ willingness to negotiate. None deal with the house itself.
2) Days on market is an arbitrary figure that carries no requirement of disclosure. If a home is being sold by an unrepresented seller, the seller isn’t required to discuss how long they have had the home on the market. If that same home is eventually listed with a real estate agent, days on market will reflect only Days on the MLS - not the time frame in which the seller tried to sell the home on their own.
Imagine this scenario … a homeowner tried to sell their home solo for two months, then lists the home. The home sells three days after the sign goes in the yard. The buyer later learns the home had been sale for two months and three days, not three days.
“I’d have paid less if I’d known that,” the buyer fumes. But does the buyer really have any recourse? I’m not a lawyer but I’d be hard pressed to find any grounds for litigation.
This isn’t a theoretical situation. A home three blocks from my house was being sold by an owner/agent on his own, not through his brokerage. He finally entered the home into the MLS. Three days later, the house sold. Days on market according to the MLS: three days.
Is the agent misleading the buyer? If you believe days on market are material, then the answer is yes. But again, there’s no legal requirement to disclose days on market. All of the debate about manipulating DOM is so much hot air wasted.
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I would like DOM available, but not on the agent report. Archive is probably the best spot for it. We have apparently trained buyers to ask the question, in spite of the fact it is not material to the property today. Who knows why it has the DOM it does? Was the property price too high and now is right? Was it difficult to show before? Was it painted orange and fuscia? Now longer relevant.