StreetEasy 893, REBNY 0

I fuming at how wrong headed this is and I'm kind of embarrassed to be a member of a profession where for some the first reaction to a crisis is to think:
"How can we cover up the facts?"
Especially when as far as I can tell one of the top consumer and regulatory desires (as well as broker claims) over the last decade has been "transparency."

palm on head

I want to play Devil's advocate on this. I am not a RE professional and I might be missing something about how this data is displayed.

If a listing service is transparent about the fact that it's pausing the clock on all listings then is it really a problem? A "day on the market" prior to this shutdown is quite different than a "day on the market" during this shutdown, so isn't it ok to pause the clock right now so long as you're telling everyone that the clock is being paused?

What am I missing?

Team M,
If every listing has "Days on Market paused as of March 20th, 2020" directly below where Days on Market appears on the listing it's one thing, but if it's simply considered "Public Knowledge" I think not. But also how do consumers differentiate between 2 listings on June 20th - one which was listed March 21st and the other which was listed June 19th and both have Days on Market as 1?

But why even do it in the first place? Presumably they think the bottom is about to fall out of the market and figure that nothing will move for several months. Why else would they try this stunt? People can count, and they know that a day is a day. Don't insult their intelligence by pretending otherwise.

My guess is that websites will probably just stop displaying Days on Market altogether so it's not like consumers can just add the number of days since March 20. So if a listing has already been on the market for 300 days that goes away too. What I don't understand is are they going to force sites to remove "Price History" as well? Because if you don't get rid of that as well what's the point?

I think this is one of those bureaucratic things that sounds right when you're discussing it with three or four of your associates behind closed doors, trying to advocate for your members during a difficult time. However when it's brought out into the light of day, it exposes it's faults.

Days on market and price history are two very important pieces of information to help consumers make decisions about purchases. Importantly these data points will remain on streeteasy. Personally I've never tracked this information through the RLS. I view it on streeteasy like everyone else. And I believe the majority of agents will continue to manually input their listings into streeteasy. I can't imagine any seller buying an argument why the listing shouldn't appear in the most searched real estate website in New York.

Keith Burkhardt

My closing which was probably typical involved about eight people plus me sitting around a table and a guy wandering in and out of the room. I don't see that kind of situation happening again for at least a couple of months even if everyone is wearing N95 masks. Paperwork being exchanged between people etc.

Yes, we had a closing at the beginning of the week. 2 people per elevator ride down?

Keith,
I agree with you, but if the whole reason that REBNY finally got off it's ass and did anything about RLS was to fight SE (this is a whole nother discussion) I think it's totally counter productive to undermine it's data partners and put them in a position where consumers who have switched over from SE will now be forced to come back here because one of the prices of data they want the most only lives here.

And it kind of makes a joke of the claim for doubt it in the first place was SE lack of transparency with Premier Agent when they just conceded the transparency moral high ground.

https://www.millersamuel.com/note/march-20-2020/?goal=0_69c077008e-8b1b923367-120786061

"How Best Intentions By Real Estate Brokers Will Destroy Public Trust And Delay A Market Rebound

By now, housing market activity has slowed down significantly with calls for a national shutdown. Home sellers are pushing back against strangers walking through their homes; real estate appraisers resist pressure from banks to place themself in harm’s way, and real estate agents struggle to come up with alternatives such as face-timing an inspection for the buyers and now…hiding negative market trends from buyers.

We are in the middle of a combined global pandemic and economic catastrophe and a group of real estate agents in New York (NYRAC), again with best intentions, proposed that Streeteasy/Zillow, arguably the Darth Vader of the NYC real estate industry, did not acquiesce to the proposal.

For NYC Listings, Time Is an Enemy. Brokers Want It Stopped [Bloomberg]

But then, REBNY, New York’s quasi-MLS capitulated to the request and opted to hide days on market from consumers on their RLS system (listings)."

Let me be on the other side of this: why should a listing continue to accrue DOM if the brokers can't show?

As I understand the lockdown, the governor has directed that brokerages shouldn't be showing properties. (I probably can, since I'm exempt as a firm of one, but for now I'm staying at home since that seems to be the *intent* of this social policy).

But if I choose not to open doors in order to flatten the curve, why penalize my sellers?

ali r.

30Y: Ah, transparency. Everyone supposedly supports it, until it actually starts to hurt their interests. Then they become big proponents of "adjusting" the data or hiding it altogether. I've seen this story in other industries as well, notably healthcare.

Ali: Is not being able to show really the right criteria to determine whether it should count towards DOM? If it really isn't on market, shouldn't the unit be pulled off market?

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/05/fake-honesty/

Question, I don't understand why the listing can't be taken off market? If showings are not off the table, what happens next? Do listings come off the market en masse? Do agents get extension on listing agreements? Clearly both inventory and demand will decline together. There will be very little volume and if you are seller who must sell and sell fast, I guess you just need to hope for a acceptable bid? Unchartered waters, all in the hopes to contain this thing as quick as possible.

Praying this nightmare is short lived and a treatment, or some good news is around the corner. Stay safe everyone

Ali, DOM is viewed relative to other listings. So everyone is accruing days and users of the data know that. Why the need to fudge data? Fudging data makes people mistrust the data. I am always a believer in giving people data as it is and then adjusted data along with reasons for adjustments.

Chatting with agents from other firms, it's clear that showings are off the table, because, even if an agent could work, the co-ops are starting to issue statements that they wouldn't let a non-resident up. So then you'd be in the position of asking the seller to show, and then the seller would have to lie to their co-op, and once they were visited by five 'friends' in a week, the co-op would call them out on it.

So yeah, the market is paused, for at least... six weeks, maybe? How long will this take?

By that measure, it doesn't feel like "fudging" data to me. if anything, keeping the DOM clock going feels like keeping the odometer on for a car that shouldn't be accumulating mileage but is really actually parked.

It does seem like the move might be to TOM, unless the theory is that everyone working from home is instead secret shopping for new apartments because they hate their old ones. Traditionally the reason we in the industry didn't TOM was that once something was TOM, it was hard to get the aggregators to re-accept it properly. With StreetEasy this used to be especially problematic. Maybe it's been fixed, I dunno.

Why are people so concerned about extra days on the market? All listings are accruing it.

Using your car analogy, should the model year of the car be changed if it is parked in a garage?

Is there no way to freeze a listing or must you relist?

The REBNY decision is ridiculous.

Do I change the DOM because a winter storm ground things to a halt, and not enough buyers wanted to go out?

Becuase it's August, there's a heatwave, the mayor is saying that older people should stay in, and so DOM for UES co-ops with financing restrictions should be tweaked?

Becuase it's Christmas, or Hanukkah, or Eid Al-Fitr/Eid Al-Adha, so all of 'their' listings should get a few free days?

Because the stock market dropped X%?

The market is the market, with all its internal and external dependencies. Days on market is just that: Number of days since the place was 'on the market'. Timer starts, and doesn't stop until a contract is signed.

The next step is demanding everyone producing "Market Reports" to count every sale as 5 sales to "adjust for market conditions."

Stache not exactly freezing but you can 'temporarily delist' list the property and it will show up as such.

Looks like StreetEasy changed their mind: "Counting Suspended."

Zillow made the announcement, they're suspending all counting.

stache, traditionally OLR (which is the interface I use to input things into the REBNY listing system) had different statuses -- TOM (temporarily off market), POM (permanently off market), OA (offer accepted), and CO (contract out), that all basically flowed into one status -- "unavailable" -- on StreetEasy.

But you can imagine why brokers would want the distinction between TOM and OA, for example. If I have a property that's OA, I'm pretty much inviting come-hither ... whereas I'd use TOM if, say, the seller is moving and the place is in such disarray that I can't get even an interested qualified client in the door. But for some reason, if you went TOM, you were nearly blocked on SE from throwing the toggle back again to Active.

StreetEasy might have more status distinctions now --and it might be easier to toggle -- I frankly can't figure it out because I've got MHF (murderous homeschooling face) on for the next few hours.

Ali-you just go to settings, then click my listings, select edit listing. From there you can do everything including changing listing statuses. These are the options:
Public View
Active
In Contract
Sold
Temporarily Off-Market
De-listed
No longer available

in the past when we used to have a feed from real plus to streeteasy, you were unable to edit the listing in streeteasy yourself. Now that they're no longer accepting feeds, I find it better because when I find an error I can correct it right away.

Keith

That's sad and pathetic that Zillow / SE also caved.

Perhaps buyers should retaliate by not counting any sales that took place after 2011 as a valid comp, since clearly they are no longer relevant in today's market.

@front_porch. Do you agree with the quote I read the other day?

“Been homeschooling a 6-year old and 8-year old for one hour and 11 minutes. Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or a week.”

@Keith, thanks! @aaron2, I believe that quote from Shonda Rimes has showed up in my FB feed about 456,000 times. But yeah, it's tough to be without the teachers. It's gonna be a l-o-n-g spring.

@30Y As of now, SE listings still show price history, so this whole "counting suspended" nonsense is useless unless they think COVID-19 affects people's ability to do basic math.

If I were on the consumer side I would see this as the brokerage community saying "we think you're stupid."

thoth,
See 7th post in this thread.

Apparently delisted units show Days on Market:
https://streeteasy.com/sale/1392201

Bug or feature?

I think it's only for active listings

Thank you Ali. Did I mention I'm in your old building? (Rather you not mention the name)

@30Y I had seen your post and that's why I was curious to see what SE would do now that they decided to also suspend counting. It's just shows how desperate people must be if they have to resort to this sort of easily bypassed nonsense to try to hide data.

I wonder if it will show 'days on market stopped' in the listing history? If so then this is really much ado about nothing. Although I do agree it's pretty dumb.