JGittes, as for the good old “just listed” garbage it is a common practice (according to my wife who just so happens to be a Classifieds Typist for real estate ads). After a certain amount of time, the MLS listing will expire…the realtor will then renew it and claim “just listed” even though it had been on the market for months. It’s just one of many tricks. Here’s one you should keep a heads up on too, a little nastier:
An unscrupulous real estate agent WILL use you to manipulate a sale. We had our eye on a house, quite some time ago, something we thought we could afford after careful and painful consideration. Unfortunately, the VERY day we went to see it it supposedly went into escrow. We told the realtor to keep us in mind if it falls through. One day we get a call from the listing agent and they said the escrow was “looking shaky” and they wanted us to make an immediate back-up offer. In a nutshell, we didn’t get the house. After a little digging we believe that it never really fell out of escrow and they were using us to manipulate the true buyers to get their act/paperwork together (our agent said they were dragging their feet) and possibly remove contingencies on the sale. If we came in with a better offer, they would have been able to force the other buyers to remove the contingencies or cancel the sale and go with us. I guess our offer wasn’t that great, which leads me to part two:
Beware mortgage brokers too. We discovered that our loan person actually new the listing agent and TOLD the listing agent what we could qualify for (not what we could pay for of course — that’s irrelevant in a day of massive credit debt and over-inflated house prices — we’re even surprised what we could qualify for, not that we could pay the resulting monthly mortgage!). So even if the house we wanted did fall out of escrow we could never have gotten a decent price. After our offer, the loan person actually CALLED our realtor and said “hey I thought these people were going to offer much more”; guess she was talking with her friend the listing agent….
