A couple of changes were announced by the NWMLS this month regarding the way they interface their internal system with publicly-viewable sites. They have been covered by other local blogs, but I thought they would at least be worth mentioning here. If you spend a lot of time tracking individual local listings on sites such as Redfin or Estately, these changes may be interesting to you.
The first change is that homes with pending offers that previously remained visible on listing sites with the status of “Subject to Inspection” will now be taken completely off the market and all listing sites. If the deal falls through, they will go back on the market. It is not clear to me whether the MLS number for the home will change when this happens.
For the full scoop on this change, check out this detailed post from Jim Reppond over at RCG.
The second change is a welcome one, as it finally addresses the issue of false advertising that we have discussed here in the past. Previously, if a listing was taken off the market and re-listed, the “days on market” number shared by the NWMLS with public listing sites was reset to zero, even while the internal NWMLS database maintained a secret cumulative days on market statistic (CDOM) that indicated the true total time a home had languished on the market.
Starting next month, CDOM will be available for display on all the listing sites. Additionally, the price history for listings will also be available (although this has been displayed on ZipRealty and Redfin for some time, they have been tracking it themselves, rather than grabbing it straight from the NWMLS database).
All in all, I think these are a series of good moves by the NWMLS, which continues to be one of the most open multiple listing services in the country.
For more information on these changes, check the links below:
(Jim Reppond, Rain City Guide, 06.02.2008)
(Jim Reppond, Rain City Guide, 06.19.2008)
(Aubrey Cohen, Seattle P-I, 06.23.2008)
(Elizabeth Rhodes, Seattle Times, 06.25.2008)