Imagine a house is listed for sale for four months before being taken off the market. After 30
days, it is returned to the market and sells eight days later.
The question: Was the house on the market eight days — or 128 days?
That seemingly innocent question has been an industry hot potato for years and has gotten hotter
with the housing meltdown of the past few years.
The question isn’t merely academic. Days on market (DOM in industry shorthand) is a widely used
barometer of the housing industry. The faster homes sell, the logic goes, the healthier the
market.
But those in the industry have also learned to take the figure with a dash of salt — especially
in the past few years, as home sellers struggled to find buyers.
In housing’s sluggish years, a house was sometimes listed with an agent at an optimistic price
for, say, six months. When the home didn’t sell by the end of the listing, sellers realized their
price was unrealistic and relisted the property at a lower price, which then attracted a buyer.
“There were a lot of homes that took more than a year to sell,” said Jim Coridan, last year’s
president of the Columbus Board of Realtors. “It took sellers a while to realize that they’re not
getting the price they want, so they took it off the market then put it back on with a different
agent.
“You could be on your second or third Realtor and taken it off the market and put it back on,
and the clock reset. But a lot of people felt that if it was on the market earlier, they’d like to
know that.”
Using only the last listing for the “days on market” creates a potentially misleading picture of
the sale. When multiplied hundreds of time, it adds up to a misleading picture of the market.
The Columbus Board of Realtors has addressed the question.
In December, the board added a new piece of information on every real-estate listing: cumulative
days on market (CDOM).
The figure adds all listings on a property within a year of when the current listing began. If a
home was listed for six months, taken off for six, then listed for six more, that is 365 days on
the market, cumulatively. (The cumulative days on the market doesn’t include time between
listings.)
Real-estate agents have always had access to such information through the Multiple Listing
Service but not in one handy spot, noted Milt Lustnauer, a RE/MAX Premier Choice agent who was
chairman of the Columbus Board of Realtor’s MLS committee last year.
“We’ve always had access to the history of listings in the MLS and could add up the days
ourselves,” said Lustnauer, who is president-elect of the board this year. “But the reaction from
Realtors has been great because they don’t have to look at the history anymore. For them, it’s been
very useful information.”
And it is useful to anyone interested in a true picture of the market.
Jim Weiker is home and garden writer. Reach him at 614-461-5513 or by e-mail.
jweiker@dispatch.com