Seattle Bubble Forum Archive

This is too funny, straight from the Puget Sound Business Journal. Dick Beeson, director of the NWMLS, doesn't want those nasty "price-reduced" signs. WHAT!? Well, of course, if people don't see those signs they won't know that prices are going down.

I just pulled my violin out of my pocket and am tuning it up.

Here's the article, but you need a subscription. Does anyone have access to the whole story?

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stor ... tory2.html

It isn't only realtors who don't like the price reduced signs. I had a listing for a condo and had to practically throttle the seller to get her to agree to drop her price( "well, an identical unit sold for 320 in July, I should get at least that!"), and then when I changed the wording of the MLS listing to say that the price had been reduced, she told me to change it, that stating that a price had been reduced was " too crass", like I was selling used cars.

Like most advertising, 'price reduced' is just a slogan with no real meaning. If I see a sale at a store for 20% off, does that mean I need to buy that product? Does it even mean that the new reduced price is a bargain. I can take any shack, price it for $12 trillion, then when it doesn't sell, reduce the price to $10 trillion. And it's still a bad deal.

The only reason realtors dislike 'price reduced' is that it's additional confirmation to their fears that nothing is selling. That, and if 40% of houses for sale have a 'price reduced' sign up, people will want to know why the house they are looking at hasn't had the price reduced yet.

I guess I could see that if I didn't move last summer. I mean, it's obvious that there's a problem in other parts of the country but maybe people here haven't gotten the word yet. Kind of like in 2006 I had to go to Long Beach on an assignment for work from August - October, and when I showed up there were signs on the ground at every stoplight for people looking for real estate investors, 'apprentices' in real estate, ... And all of a sudden sometime in September all of those signs vanished and were replaced with 'Stop foreclosure now!' and things like that. It was a few months after that before I started to hear about how things had changed over there.