MLS AR6060519, Arlington County, Va.: “Location, location, location! For sale at recent appraisal price!”
Wow, you’ll let me buy the house for what an appraiser you hired says it worth? Gee, thanks. (The county appraisal is over $70K less, and in many cases these appraisals are themselves inflated, because they are based on value as of last Summer, which was the top of the market in Arlington). And the listing is now three months old, and since then prices have fallen a bit in the region, including, from what I can tell, Arlington (According to data from this site, the average sell price in Arlington went down between May and July from approximately $594K to approximately $524K, with the averages going down a similar amount. That seems way too dramatic to me for two months, and I’m sure at least in part reflects a change in the mix of properties sold, but we’re clearly not in an uptrend).
What would lead the listing agent to think that this is a good way of creating interest in the property?
And while we’re on the subject of real estate listings, a huge percentage of them have typos or spelling errors(today I saw “closeing”). For the three percent the sellers’ agents get, do you think they could run their text through a spell check? Also, lots of listings have inaccuracies or misrepresentations, ranging from misstating the square footage to claiming that a house well over a mile from the metro is “walking distance.”
In case you’re wondering, I’m just browsing the listings, not in the market yet.