Weekly Special | April 3, 2023

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO SELL A HOME?

This graph was painstakingly assembled after hundreds of hours of data scrubbing. Here’s what you need to know.

Garbage In = Garbage Out.

That’s one of the first lessons I picked up as I pursued my undergraduate degree in computer science at West Point. Computers might be able to answer any question, but if you give them bogus data, they will respond with faulty conclusions.

Here’s an example: Agent “Mary” tells home sellers that her average market time is 17 days. She can pull a report from the Tallahassee MLS and sure enough, it shows that, on average, Mary takes 17 days to sell a home. But I know better (and now so do you).

You see, Mary likes her statistics to tell a different story than her actions reveal. Mary likes to cancel her listings every week and then create new versions of the same listings. This “resets” the market time to zero days, and Mary tells her home sellers that buyers will think the listing is brand new and thus want to see it. In reality, she doesn’t want her market time statistics to show the months and years she often takes to sell a home. And buyers aren’t stupid!

Now, imagine that half of the real estate agents in the Tallahassee MLS do something similar, manipulating the market time on their listings by canceling and restarting listings.

So, how long does it take to sell a home today? The answer might shock you!

This issue went with a longer report on our blog: read the full blog post. The original one-page Weekly Special PDF is still available.