The Twin Cities Real Estate Blog has a recent entry on a subject that has vexed this home-hunter: out-of-date real estate listings.
Realtor Aaron Dickinson writes:
As anyone in the housing market today knows, many homes listed as “Active” are really “Pending” because they have an offer accepted subject to inspection or in the case of REO (bank owned) & short sale homes, they often have multiple offers on them already. Because our MLS does not have a status for “Active with Offer,” Realtors and consumers have a hard time finding out what properties are truly available until the agent sets up a showing – a very frustrating and time consuming process.
As Dickinson notes, some agents are starting to add details to the listings about whether a house is sold pending an inspection, or whether a property is stuck in short sale limbo, waiting for a bank to approve an offer.
By searching these fields, Dickinson found 884 listings that are currently marked active but look to be pending. The majority of these are lender mediated listings. Because many agents won't bother making these notes, he predicts there could be a couple thousand false active listings out there.
Sadly,I know too well that that's the case. Mr. Kablog and I found our dream home this summer and were ready to sign on the dotted line without even having our house on the market. We learned just minutes after our showing that an offer had already been accepted before we walked in the door.
To our dismay, I recently learned that it sold for below its asking price, when we would have paid 10 percent more to be handed the keys. I walked around mourning that house for days. And after more searching throughout the summer and nothing coming close to that home, we gave up .