We recently ran into a situation that we thought we would pass along to our faithful blog readers concerning an incident, whereby a fellow Realtor, through a lack of details and knowledge, was hurting her ”selling client” who was employing her to market and sell their property. Let me fill you in on all the grizzly details.
Jose and myself were sitting an open house at one of our listings and a potential buyer came into the open house and expressed a desire to locate a 5 bedroom home with a pool within the area. We were set up at our open house with all the technological necessities that are needed in order to convert the open house into an “office on the go” and as such, we had Internet access and a computer to access the Multiple Listing Service, a data bank of properties that Realtors use to search for properties. I immediately cranked up the system and plugged into the MLS search engine … 5 bedroom homes with a private pool. Under this search criterion there were 2 properties found. We gave the information to the potential buyers and asked them if they wanted to see the properties. Upon their acknowledgement, Jose put them into his car and went out to show the properties.
In the meantime, I had a brief lull in the open house activity and had time to do a slower more methodical search of the properties on the market. I was rechecking the properties in an effort to find a pool home that I might have missed, for one reason or another, on my initial brief search. Sure enough, I found one that did not come up in my initial search. I was somewhat baffled why this pool home did not appear on my initial search for pool homes. I looked over the listing information and …bam…there it was, an error made by the listing agent when she imputed the listing into the MLS.
Let me give you some background. When an agent takes a listing, one of the most important aspect of their job is to make sure that the information imputed into the MLS data bank is correct and up to date. When an agent is searching for a home with a pool, a differentiation needs to be made between a private pool and a community pool. Clients with a pool in their back yard are labeled, for MLS input purposes, as “private pool” owners. Properties with community pools, do not get this “private pool” designation unless they also have a private pool in their backyard. When an agent is searching for a pool home on the MLS, 99.9% of the agent will code in the “private pool” designation in an effort to find the homes with the pool in the backyard. This is exactly what I did when I quickly looked for that special pool home for our open house client.
The pool home I found in my second, more mythodical search, was only found because I had the time to look at all the pictures of the listed properties and saw a home, not on my initial list, that had a private pool. Why hadn’t this home come up on my “private pool” search? Well, the reason was an error we see far too often. When the listing agent coded information into the MLS on this particular pool home she did not imput the “private pool” label. She did input the following: community pool, heated and filtered, and gunite….but she did not input”private pool”. As a result, when someone is looking for a “private pool” within this community/area, this property will not appear. It is a simple error that the listing agent made… but a egregious one. This is a prime example of how an agent can hurt the prospects of a seller in marketing the home.
When Jose and myself advise clients on selling their homes we often give them a detailed description of all the steps needed in order to place the property on the market. We always sum up by telling the prospective sellers that the most important ingredients are 1. PRICE, 2. EASE OF ACCESS INTO THE PROPERTY, and 3. NO ERRORS BY THE LISTING AGENT. Above is a perfect example of a violation of principle #3. The agent made a mistake when she imputed the listing into the MLS and that error will continue to affect the property until it is discovered by the listing agent. This error is not fatal, but it is a big one and another reason why the public must exercise their due diligence when picking the right Broker to list and sell their home. It’s all in the details.
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Hey guys – great post! It isn’t very often that you find people that have so much experience and information that are also willing to share it with the world instead of keeping it to themselves. I’ll definitely follow your blog and will be in touch if I have any real estate needs for the future and will tell friends in this area. I also shared this on Digg and Stumbleupon, hope I did that right!
Thanks.