House Broker Says Northwest Home Sellers Need Blogging

An influential house broker who owns a Seattle-based property firm said that the decision of the Northwest Multiple Listing Service to allow home sellers to remove automated valuation models from their listings and to prevent realtors from blogging about the sellers’ properties will ultimately hurt the house sellers NWMLS is trying to help.

According to NWMLS officers, they decided to enable home sellers to block blogging about their homes for sale because of the growth of negative blogging on the Internet about properties sold by sellers.

NWMLS officers also said that oftentimes, the AVMs are not updated, confusing prospective buyers and blocking sales, instead of encouraging further inquiries, which is among the purposes of AVMs.

AVMs are the values that appear in listings, informing customers the current market values of the properties being sold. They were meant to help affirm listed prices and assure customers they are buying at correct market values, but AVMs become a problem when they differ significantly from the listed prices.

NWMLS director Dick Beeson called on suppliers of AVMs to make more efforts to access real-time information so the AVMs are up to date.

According to a house broker experienced in the Northwest, blocking blogging and AVMs does not benefit home sellers. He explained that negative blogging can increase traffic and trigger more inquiries about the property in question. He added that home buyers now are knowledgeable about filtering information and weighing the truthfulness of available information.

Beeson affirmed the broker’s observation. He added that blocking AVMs could send negative signals to agents and buyers, triggering doubts about the real condition of the properties being sold. He said that sellers should see blogging as subjective and see AVMs as representing objective hard facts.

The operator of one popular AVM said that eliminating AVMs will worsen the home buying experience and will put all important information about a property into the hands of the realtor or broker.

According to NWMLS head Beeson, his group has been considering issuing more information to operators of AVMs to make their AVMs more accurate. AVM models can be enhanced to reach their highest potential if they can access real-time real estate data.

With the changes, every house broker in the Northwest has been monitoring the reaction of sellers to the new ruling. Beeson estimates that more than half will block AVMs and more than half will prevent blogging.