April Fool’s, or Groundhog’s Day?  I feel like it’s the latter…

I feel like I’ve written this before, only this time, there is no question as to whether this is false advertising.

Tie goes to the runner, and I can’t resist posting this one as well:

So let’s talk a little bit about false advertising in real estate, shall we?

Every consumer will have his or her opinion on what constitutes false advertising, and unfortunately, listing a house for $999,000 with “offers graciously reviewed on April 7th” and then selling the house for $1,185,000 is NOT false advertising.

People don’t like it, but it happens all the time, and it’s not false advertising.

The only way, in real estate, that a seller (and/or agent) can be guilty of false advertising is if they advertise a price that they would not accept, AND demonstrate that they would not accept it, AND keep the price the same after doing so.

For example, listing a house at $999,000, only reviewing offers on April 7th, and ending up with $1,185,000 doesn’t qualify, since the sellers never demonstrated that they wouldn’t accept the $999,000 price.  Sure, they were never going to accept that price, and the house was priced for a bidding war, but nobody offered them $999,000, they never turned it down, and thus they were never guilty of false advertising.

In fact, it would be really, really difficult to be guilty of false advertising in real estate.

You’d have to be really, really stupid.

You’d basically have to write something to the effect of “The seller will not accept the asking price,” which we all know, no person on the planet is stupid enough to do.

Right?

A real estate agent, with all that super-duper important training and schooling that goes into a real estate licence these days, would never be so completely out of touch as to genuinely point out their false advertising gimmick.  Right?

Or, maybe not.

Take a look at the MLS caption for this listing below:

Thanks to my colleague, Anita Merlo, for bringing this to my attention.  Anita has 27  years in the business, and sits on the RECO Ethics panel, so I think she’s a good person to bring this to light!

“Any Offer Must Be Higher than The Askin’price Upon The Satisfactory Of The Seller.”

Okay, first thing’s first: this person clearly cannot speak English.

But don’t want my blog-troll, Rene Brassard, to come on here and start pointing out speling and grammmatical errors, or we’ll be here all day…

My fear here, to be honest, is that this agent could get away with this because his/her English so poor, and something like, “…..upon the satisfactory of the seller” might be an excuse, as it shows that the seller can’t string two words together, and maybe, perhaps, this was an honest mistake.  Maybe the agent isn’t really saying, “The seller won’t accept the asking price,” as we ALL know it is intended to say!

Folks, this is blatant false advertising, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

A listing agent could verbally say, “My sellers want more than asking” in a phone conversation, and you could never prove it’s false advertising.

A seller could sign-back an offer above the asking price, then leave the for-sale-price the same the next day, and you’d have a hard time convincing RECO there’s a case.

But this is clearly false advertising.

The property is listed for $519,900, and if the seller were offered, $520,000, and rejected it, they’d legally have to re-list the next day at $520,001.

But why even bother with that?

The seller has spoken, via his or her agent, saying “Any Offer Must Be Higher Than The Asking Price.”

This is NOT the same thing as a seller pricing at $999,000, holding-back offers, and creating a bidding war.

This is like offering a Big Mac for $1.99, and then saying, “That will be six dollars please,” and not selling it for anything less.

You can’t put a price-tag of $19.99 on a shirt at Winners and then charge the consumer $22.00 at the register.  And you certainly can’t tell them you’re going to do so!

Who would ever get involved with this listing?

-As-is condition
-Offers submitted electronically only (ie. no presentation allowed)
-Offers presented as per seller’s instructions
-2 Business days irrevocable

Oh yeah, and the offer price must be higher than the listing price!

And you should see their Schedule-B!

It looks like this listing agent wants to indemnify him/herself of any and all liability, take zero responsibility for the listing, and above all, has no problem demonstrating blatant false advertising.

Let me be honest here, folks.

I’ve had a RECO complaint filed against me for something I wrote on my blog.  Something that was utterly anonymous (only the person who read what I wrote would know/assume it was about him/her), totally true, and something that the average consumer would want to know.

So RECO can spend time chasing down bogus complaints that will never amount to anything, but how about tackling the listing above, where the listing agent is committing the very definition of false advertising?

Isn’t this something we’d like to change?  Something we’d like to get out of the industry?

dis@trebnet.com

That stands for “Data Integrity Service,” and it’s where you need to send emails when you see things on MLS listings that shouldn’t be there.

As for RECO complaints, I’ll let you guys use your Google-fu to figure it out.

You all know that I can’t post the address of the listing above, or I’d be in trouble.  (I know how ironic that is…)

Sure, this is one case out of tens of thousands, but it bothers me, and it bothered enough agents in my office that two different people put the listing on my desk with notes that said, “David, you need to blog about this.”

Just don’t paint all Realtors with the same brush.

Some people are actually committing these acts, while others are trying to bring them to light, and get them out of the industry…