The Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors has a fantastic assortment of stats that are published on weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly cycles. These reports are based off the listing data provided by our local MLS, the Regional MLS of Minnesota.
As anyone who works with data knows, the statistics you create are only as good as the data underlying it – also known as: “garbage in, garbage out.”
The RMLS has several different statuses for MLS listings like: Active, Pending, and Sold. As anyone in the housing market today knows, many homes listed as “Active” are really “Pending” because they have an offer accepted subject to inspection or in the case of REO (bank owned) & short sale homes, they often have multiple offers on them already. Because our MLS does not have a status for “Active with Offer,” Realtors and consumers have a hard time finding out what properties are truly available until the agent sets up a showing – a very frustrating and time consuming process.
Luckily, some Realtors have been adding to their MLS remarks fields information about listings being “sold subject inspection” or “short sale offer accepted- backup offers only.”
On Monday I looked at these remarks fields and searched for terms used to describe accepted offers subject to inspection, multiple offers, and offers subject to bank approval. What I found was that there are 884 listings that are currently marked Active but look to be “Pending.” Of these 884 listings, 675 were short sale and an additional 50 were bank owned, making a total of 82% of these shadow pendings “lender mediated.”
In my experience, more listings are never updated with these kind of remarks than are, so it is quite possible that more than 2000 listings that we see as available inventory are really not.
While the data that MAAR is currently publishing is entirely accurate based on the data they are provided, this clearly shows that there’s more activity happening than is currently reported- which to any buyer or agent in the field right now matches perfectly with our experiences.
I don’t think those listings are pending. If they are they should say so. I think that I treat them as pending and I don’t generally show them but I have been tracking how many of them go to pending or sold and so far the numbers are not very high. Maybe we need a new category like “I don’t know” or “still taking offers need __more” or “bank still sitting on this”.
I’ll have to add those categories to the list of suggestions!