Inventory variations

barista

I have been looking at the SFH and Condo inventories for seattle area for a couple of weeks now and the numbers seem to vary a lot. So what causes this frequent variation? With not many sells happening what makes the numbers go down? Is it the people who take down their listings or something else?

deejayoh

barista wrote:

I have been looking at the SFH and Condo inventories for seattle area for a couple of weeks now and the numbers seem to vary a lot. So what causes this frequent variation? With not many sells happening what makes the numbers go down? Is it the people who take down their listings or something else?

I think what you are seeing is some sales, some expirations, and a whole lot of "clean up". I think it's pretty common for agent's to submit a listing multiple times - either accidentally or purposely (e.g., to list in two separate areas). The MLS seems to have some sort of "clean up" routine they run to purge these listings that gets run about every night. Sometimes it appears to remove valid listings because I see listings show up again as new in my RSS reader a few days after they originally show up.

This is my hypothesis. Someone with experience on MLS can chime in to confirm or correct - but I get the sense that it is a really balky system that's none to user friendly and requiring lots of care and feeding.

ira s

I don't know about maintaining MLS listings, but inputting listings is quite simple. I do think that a lot of agents do list the same property twice in two different area, but sometimes I never see that "cleaned up."
A lot of listings do expire , and sometimes the seller takes a break before re-listing it.

mukoh

NWMLS allows listing of the same property in different areas for a $fee, some agents do it without paying the fee and those do get cleaned, just like a condo is allowed to list as condo and a single family home for a $fee.

ira s

To elaborate on what Mukoh said, for a fee an additional listing can be made for a separate area, but according to NWMLS rule 22.b , the property must be within 1/2 a mile of the boundary of a geographically contiguous area.

deejayoh

My observation is that the nightly drop is far in excess of what can be accounted for by sales and expirations (especially given that the volume of new listings exceeds sales and expirations)- so there must be something else going on.

Based on the number of times I see a new listing twice on Windermere - with exactly the same info - I am just guessing it's some sort of purge routine.