Ummm, perhaps I should explain what I am talking about.
I am currently, sort of, looking for a place to buy in Melbourne. I am attempting to do the sitting back and waiting to pounce thing, which basically means that I have signed up to alerts from the various real estate sites including domain.com.au. So today, as is usual for a Monday morning, I am sent an email with "New and updated" properties that meet my criteria. In todays email a good looking property popped up.
Sweet!
So I click through to the page for the house, looks reasonably promising from the site of that. But I notice that there is sale type or inspection times. Thats a bit weird, no matter I'll do my usual things, loading up Google Earth and Street view and checking how it looks, calculating the land area, do a quick search for anything about the house.
It all looks pretty good, so I inquire when the inspections are on. I actually get a call pretty quick from the agent.
It was sold yesterday at Auction.
What the fuuuuuuuuuu...............
Why the hell am I getting it highlighted to me as an updated property? It sure looks like the update should be that it has sold! But it would seem that the update is simply removing the sale type and date etc. If I'd gone there and seen the auction date as yesterday I wouldn't have bothered looking any more. Assuming they just hadn't updated it yet.
Why wouldn't you just delete the whole ad? Or update it to say sold! Which is what they have done on realeastateview.com.
I notice that Domain isn't the only site that has done it is is the same way on realestate.com.au, that is no sale type or date shown.
Ahh I feel better now, I'd just wish they'd sort the site out (but I will admit that they do have a lot of problems to fix....).
Putting an ad on a site like domain costs money, but updating is free, so when the property is sold the agent doesn't update it for ages, in the hope that people like you will ring up and the agent can hawk another property on you. The other thing is that properties actually up for sale are almost universally without a price. The price goes up when the property is sold. This is to keep the buyers in the dark about prices and stuff. The way you gotta do it is to gather metrics and do complex maths.
ReplyDeleteI do kind of understand why they do it, it is just that to me at least the reasoning is rather flawed.
ReplyDeleteIf I as a user of the website have already found the property on the website I can find all the other similar properties on the website as well.
The property is gone now, it has been taken down because its sold. Spruking an already sold property doesn't make me impressed with their real estating skills, it just annoys me and makes me inclined to use a different real estate agent in the future. It is like they don't realise that pissing off a buyer pisses off a future seller as well.