Anytime the mls changes something, it creates some “fallout” as agents learn about the new rule and adjust. The mls changed to “cumulative” days on market. The mls made a new rule that agents couldn’t cancel and re-list to change the number. Then the mls had a glitch in the system the first week in January.

If you listed a house on December 20th, you would get a 25000000. Most agents want to trade that in for a 26000000 number come January 1. This is nothing new. Many agents won’t list a property until after January 1 for this reason, especially now that there is a new rule that you can’t get the number updated.

To make matters worse, creating what you observed, when all of the agents who waited until after January 1 entered the properties, the mls had a glitch in the system that gave them 25000000 sequence numbers. I think that glitch lasted a few days into the beginning of 2006. All of those listings were then re-assigned new numbers because of the error, not because they were tired and stale. So if you were observing all of this in January, you were correct that something strange was going on. But only agents who entered listings in the first few days of the year may have even noticed.

Thankyou SO MUCH for your explanations. I have been watching the Seatle market since winter on the different realtor web sites and started to notice this phenomenon of more and more properties being re-listed and presented as !!!NEW ON MARKET!!!

When I’d ask realtors about it I’d get very evasive answers like “No never happens” (which was obviously not true) to “”it’s just a mistake” (which made me wonder how competent can somebody be if they can’t manage a simple computer listing correctly!)

Lately, this has been happening more and more (tired properties -as you call them-presented as new) and I started feeling really jerked around by never getting a straightforward answer.

From what I can see, the Seatle market is cooling somewhat. The evasiveness made me feel it was perhaps even more than what I could see from observing the MLS. Like people were beginning to feel they really needed to cover something up.

Thankyou very much Ardell. That is all I ever wanted was an honest answer .

Oddly enough you see this phenomena on Craigslist too. If something doesn’t sell, the seller re-posts it and it moves to the top of the newness filter. It’s an effective marketing tactic. (I’m sure it happens on Ebay, Monster and other electronic marketplaces too).

I can’t speak for most buyers, but days on the market isn’t a major criteria I use to determine if I want to buy a house. If a house isn’t a good value, it doesn’t matter to me if it’s been on the market 1day or 1 year. Because if the house was a good value, it would’ve sold already.

Great Post. Maybe you *are* a Jedi master.

Agents have access to seeing the whole stream of events of a property listing, going back for several years. I remember seeing a house listed as “new on market” on one of the newer websites, thinking to myself “in your dreams” as that house had been on and off market for three years without a bite. That is the danger of websites that boldly state the number of days on market, which is often erroneous.

That brings us to the last issue, which is the mls#. Over the years agents have often withdrawn and relisted property to update the listing number, especially in the beginning of a new year. Listing numbers 2500000 are from 2005 and listing numbers 26000000 are from 2006.

Now this is not a LAW, but I do remember the mls posting on our agent access site that an agent was “no longer allowed” to pull a listing and put it back in just to update the mls#. That being said, I have seen some doing it, especially back in January.

Sounds like you may have made a decision based on what you thought were “days on market” only to find that those days were much longer than the current listing indicated.

When people ask me how long it has been on market, I never look at the days on market on the printout. I always do a full property history of the listing. Though some clients get annoyed when I don’t just read the Day On Market listed on the sheet.

Reducing a price and putting in new photos is clearly a good way to “refresh” a “tired” listing. That is marketing. In fact it is “good” marketing.

I strongly recommend that some of the newer, fancy dancy, Robbie loves them sites should take out that “new on market in the last 7 days” button. You can see from “wondering’s” dismay, that this is something a consumer may believe they can rely on, and clearly cannot.

What, if any, are the laws governing the MLS in WA State?

Is it legal to list a property for a couple months under one MLS#, take it off the realty site for a week or so then put it back on that same realty site or others under a different MLS#, with new pictures, new price and new MLS#.

I see this happening more and more in the past few months. Is it legal?