Turning Back the Clock to Sell a House

RISMEDIA, December 20, 2006-(NYTimes.com )-A house that remains unsold is kind of like an aging film star: the longer it sits, available but ignored, the less attractive it is in the marketplace. New listings grab all the brokers' attention, while the only potential buyers for the stale property are those looking to pay significantly less than the asking price.

Agents with listings that are at or near stale status sometimes try a strategy that is akin to turning back the clock. They remove the property from the multiple listing service, relist it a day or two later, and voilà! the same house appears as a new listing on the listing service's daily sheet, a must-read for every agent.

"You're trying to fool some of the people" by decreasing the time the house has been on the market, said Terry Hastings, a former broker who now runs Hamilton Mortgage in Ridgefield and teaches real estate licensing classes.

For those agents fairly new to the market, determining that a "new" listing is actually old -a key factor in price negotiations-requires researching its history through the listing system's computer database.

Buyers have no access to the database, because multiple listing services, which carry information about all properties listed by their members in specific areas, are privately operated. Membership is restricted to licensed brokers and agents.

Buyers who never learn that a "new" listing is actually old lose leverage that could help reduce the price.

Agents generally agree that relisted properties get only partial cover from a new listing.

"It doesn't really fool experienced agents" because they will probably recall the old listing, said Paul Hughes, a sales associate with William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty in Wilton, Connecticut.

Yet the tactic can be effective under certain circumstances-and often fools enough inexpert agents initially to produce a burst of fresh traffic. "It's amazing the number of showings" that relisting can generate, said Barbara Wells, an agent with Prudential Connecticut Realty in Greenwich.

As the number of relisted properties increases in the current sluggish housing market, some multiple listing services are keeping a closer watch on the practice and tightening their rules.

"There are those agents who go out and play this game," said Don Hull, president and chief executive of the Consolidated Multiple Listing Service, which serves Fairfield County. "We don't encourage it, but we can't forbid it."

Connecticut law requires that a relisting represents a new contractual agreement, Hull said.

This is automatic when a seller changes agents. But sometimes, the property is relisted even though the agent does not change. Some agents simply void an existing contract with the seller and draw up a new one before they relist, to meet the law.

The Consolidated Multiple Listing Service recently added a new feature to its database that flags for the service's administrators any listing that has been canceled and relisted by the same agency. The agents must then produce documentation to show they canceled the listing legitimately, with a voided contract, Hull said.

The Greenwich Multiple Listing Service adopted a new policy in August to prevent agencies from manipulating the system to reduce their publicized average selling time.

If an agent cancels a listing and relists the same property within 90 days, instead of resetting the market time to zero, the database will show the days on market from the date of the first listing, according to Russell Pruner, an owner of Shore & Country Properties and president of the Greenwich Association of Realtors, which runs the Greenwich listing service.

The practice continues, however, because regardless of the days-on-the-market count on the computer, every relisting is still included on the daily sheet. "Agents who don't know the market well will view it as a new listing," Pruner said.

Several experienced agents said they did not endorse relisting a property within a short time span unless there had been a substantial change in either the property or the price. Otherwise, they said, the strategy could backfire.

"Buyers don't want to be manipulated," said Kenneth Delmar, a sales associate with Keller Williams Realty in Stamford. "If they think you've manipulated them, it's worse than if you just left the house on the market."

But Theresa Blinder, an agent with Realtors3/William Pitt Sotheby's International in Wilton, equates some relistings with reintroducing a consumer product to give it a fresh look. "It's all about relaunching what you've got," she said.

A contemporary home she listed in Wilton, for example, sat on the market for nearly seven weeks this fall without attracting much interest.

After the owners sold it to a relocation company, Blinder and her partners canceled the listing last month and put up an entirely new listing for the new seller a day later. They rewrote the description, replaced all the photos with ones using different rooms and angles and reduced the price by $20,000-from $1.19 million to $1.17 million. A buyer put down a deposit on the property in less than two weeks, Blinder said.

Overpricing is the primary reason that properties sit unsold and then wind up being relisted at lower prices, according to Mr. Hughes. A "vast majority" of homeowners listing their properties are "ignoring the advice of their agents and want to list at a higher price" than the market will bear, he said.

Sellers have also failed to accept the longer selling time in a slower market, brokers say. When weeks pass without an offer, sellers get nervous, and agents may suggest canceling and relisting as a selling strategy. Persuading sellers to reduce the price can still be a challenge, however.

"Some people will take it off," said Doris Ghitelman, an agent with William Raveis in Southport, "and then put it back on for a higher price."

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