We are currently trying to sell our house. We signed a marketing agreement with our realtor, which stated that he would be listing the house on MLS as "coming soon" approximately 2 weeks in advance of when we actually put it on the market. The marketing agreement specifically states that the time during which the house is listed as "coming soon" will not be counted by Zillow as time on market.
However, we recently sold another house and had an issue where Zillow ended up counting the time on market from the date that the house was listed on MLS as "coming soon". So we were very concerned about this strategy, and we discussed this with our realtor, and told him point blank that we would rather not list it on MLS as "coming soon" for that reason.
He insisted that it would be fine and still then listed us our house as "coming soon" on MLS, and when we finally listed the house as for sale, as expected, Zillow counted the time on market from when it was originally listed as "coming soon". So from the day we listed the house as for sale, Zillow claimed the house had been on market for 14 days already.
We are already in a very rough sellers market, so this has made an already frustrating situation even more so. We have had the house on market now for a few days, and we have not had any requests for showings thus far. (This is in a very solidly middle / upper-middle class neighborhood in a good school district.)
Do we have any recourse against the realtor here? If the situation continues to progress unfavorably, we are considering either attempting to negotiate down their commission or trying to drop them entirely and list with someone else.
Realtor Listed House as "Coming Soon" on MLS; Zillow is Counting That as Time On the Market
byu/Xiaolingtong inRealEstate
Posted by Xiaolingtong
5 Comments
You think that you haven’t had any showings because it shows it has been listed for 2 weeks?
Yea that’s the problem with coming soon. You could have done a confidential listing, which would not accumulate days on market, but then there’s limited exposure… it would just be marketed to the listing agents brokerage.
Thats at least how it works for my MLS in Illinois.
Highly doubt this is the reason you got no showings even with your lack of context. If it is a seller’s market all you need to do is price it well for its condition and buyers will know.
This is absolutely a first world problem.
Those marketing tricks don’t work on intelligent people either your buyers are out there and they will come look at your house or that buyer is not looking quite yet.
Another realtor will always reach out to your realtor if they have serious buyers.