The Elegant Augusta Real Estate Blog

Lydia Taylor November 20th, 2007

For the real estate professional, one of the biggest tasks in taking on a home listing is marketing the home. Some agents are more savvy than others, some agents invest more in marketing materials, and some agents (many actually) don’t do anything but list the home in the local MLS and stick a sign in the yard. Or maybe they just do the sign.

The primary way most agents can market your home is to publish your home listing in an MLS or Multiple Listing System. This a system used by Realtors to collate and share data with each other on the real estate market. Not just homes appear there- most MLS systems also have information on commercial real estate, and land & lots for sale.

For home sellers, the primary thing that your listing agent should do is list your home in the appropriate MLS system. For most of the service area of this website, that system is the GAAR-MLS, or Greater Augusta Area Realtors - Multiple Listing System. There is a local exception- nearby Aiken SC has a standalone MLS system. However, the Aiken area is also covered by the GAAR-MLS. This leads to an overlap where a home for sale in that area could be found in one or both Listing Systems. That leads to the first error in my list of stupid Realtor tricks:

Stupid Trick #1: List a home in the wrong MLS

I’ve run across homes listed in MLS systems that were physically located well outside of the actual intended coverage area of the MLS. The listing agent does bear responsibility to list the home with the proper Listing System, but it still occurs sometimes. Usually the cause is that someone has decided to use an out-of-area agent to market their home. That listing agent may not be a member of the local MLS, and therefore unable to list homes on the local board. Instead they just use the only MLS they have access to, which may be geographically far away from the listing. They could ask another agent in the locality to co-list, so the other agent can enter the home in the local MLS, but then they would have to split the commission. Why do that?

This condition causes those homes to get much less exposure to local buyers agents, as those Realtors in the area often don’t realize the home is even on the market. Situations like that can be very unfortunate for the property owner.

As I mentioned earlier, the Augusta area has two MLS boards that overlap. If you have a home that is located inside of Aiken or near the outskirts of Aiken, make sure you ask your Realtor which system they are using to market your home. It is possible they can market your home in either system, or both.

Stupid Trick #2: Don’t list a home on a MLS at all

Unfortunately many homes can be found where the listing agents don’t even bother to list the home in the MLS at all. They save money that way- the fees for accessing a MLS system to list houses typically are very expensive. Part-time agents, small brokerages, and just plain cheap-skates often fall in this category. Of course, if you are listing a home with someone in this group, you are rarely aware of that. If you haven’t prepared for extended holding costs due to dramatically lower exposure of the home to potential buyers, you may be in for a shock. I like think of it as the FSBO effect (For Sale by Owner homes are rarely marketed through a MLS).

Stupid Trick #3: Is your home actually marketed through a MLS?

Don’t take the listing agents word about the home being shown in a MLS either. I ran across one home seller who thought their home was marketed in the Augusta MLS. They found out otherwise after they fired their first listing agent and entered a listing agreement with another agent. All of a sudden they saw their home everywhere online! Trust, but verify: Ask your listing agent to send you a printout of the MLS entry. Verify the listing details and that it is indeed published in a MLS System backed by a Board of Realtors. Make sure what they give you is a legitimate MLS listing sheet located in the proper area (not just Zillow.com or some such).

There are two more tricks I’d like to share with you. One may affect you as a home seller, the other is just shady black-hat stuff that some real estate agents have been known to try.

Stupid Trick #4: Isolate your listing data in a black hole.

When a Realtor enters a listing in a MLS system, they can choose to ‘push’ the listing to extra-party ‘feeds’; OR they can hold the listing in such a way that it can only be seen through the main site- the one used by Realtors only. What does that mean? If they put a hold on the listing, it means that websites like mine and others that offer their visitors home search will NOT have any data on that home.

My site ‘pulls’ all current listings from the GAAR-MLS every night. Other sites, such as my brokerage’s website MeybohmRealtors.com, or the newspaper’s website at AugustaRealEstate.com, do the same thing. If a home is restricted from the feed, it won’t show up on those websites or any other second-party website. It will only show up on the official MLS board’s website.

Why would a listing agent do that? I dunno! I figure the more the merrier, so if those other sites want to help show off my listing, that’s great!

Other agents and brokers may not agree- they want to market the listing exclusively. It’s quite common to find homes listed only on the official MLS board that won’t be seen anywhere else.

Stupid Trick #5: Continually relist the home to hide the past.

Whats that ‘black hat’ trick? Well, that one is old as the hills, and happens throughout the United States. Lets say you list your home with a high initial asking price. After a month of no showings, you are starting to get frustrated. Thats when your listing agent suggests lowering the price, so naturally you go along with their advice. They could just change the price on the listing, but they don’t. What they actually do is pull the home off of whatever MLS they may be using, then create a new listing for the home at the lower price. Then the agent ‘relists’ the home. This starts the clock all over, and it appears that the home is newly listed due to the last listing date.

An agent doing this could claim a lower time-on-the-market before sell, or that they had x # of home listings in the last year, etc. There are other agents that play a variant on this game where they change the wording on the description or fix a miss-spelled word, doing whatever it takes for an excuse to re-list. Some agents will do this 4-5 times per home listing. MLS boards are starting to crack down on this, but it still happens, and in some cases state or local legislation has been proposed to deal with the problem.

One of the funniest instances of this that I personally encountered is where an agent sent a mailing of glossy postcards to all the addresses in my neighborhood. On it, they claimed that they had sold a nearby home less than 12 days after receiving the listing! The real story was that they had relisted the home multiple times- in fact the home had been on the market for many weeks. Every homeowner in the neighborhood knew that. But, the home had indeed sold only 12 days after the last re-list.

Final Thoughts:

All these stories are examples of Caveat venditor - which is Latin for ‘Let the seller beware’. When you are listing your home for sale, please, please, PLEASE interview your agent.

I have a few suggested questions for that interview: Are you listing my home in the local MLS system? Are there multiple MLS systems covering the area where my home is located? Will you use more than one to gain maximum exposure for my home? Will my listing be available online through extra-party websites? Will you practice honesty when handling my listing data, and will you use that data in self-promotional material later?

Don’t get Discouraged!

I don’t want to leave you with an impression that every listing agent is out to con you. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The majority are hard working and ethical. However it always helps to arm yourself with knowledge in every endeavor.

Lastly I wish you good luck selling your home! If you happen have a house in the Augusta area and need advice, have questions, or need a listing agent, feel free to give me a call. I’d love to list your home!

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