Over the past 2 years, the practice of omitting sales price information from Multiple Listing Service sales forms has increased, possibly skewing reported median home price data, reports Steve Brown in the Dallas Morning News. In several high-end Dallas neighborhoods, transactions with a “Z” in the price column now account for the majority of sales: “Because of the way the MLS database is structured, it’s hard to find out how prevalent the practice is. . . . Jim Gaines, an economist with Texas A&M University’s Real Estate Center, wonders how withheld prices affect the data his center releases to the public each month. ‘Of course, if these are systematically at lower prices, then our averages and medians are overstated to the extent they are not showing lower-priced property sales,’ Gaines said.” Texas is one of only 5 states that doesn’t require public disclosure of home sales prices. [Dallas Morning News]
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4 Comments
Well, duh. Do ya think there is any correlation between the fact that developers run the State and the inability to get honest information about the market?
If it were up to the real estate industry, no one would even know about the meltdown, but it was a little hard to hide the gifting by Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to banking buddies to cover their losses.
Realtors withholding information from MLS? Not possible. They are all highly ethical, after all, and would NEVER do such a thing.
Right? Wrong.
Well, of course Texas is one of only five states not to require disclosure; that would benefit consumers. You can’t have that in the land of Republican hypocrites.
Non-disclosure has been around a long time. It’s a non-partisan kind of deal.