I’m shopping for a home around DC, particularly in the Manassas/Chantilly areas. I’m fucking disgusted at the lack of effort that real estate agents put into thier online listings. I’m so fucking pissed right now that I can barely type.
There is NO FUCKING EXCUSE for not listing the total finished sq/ft of a house. NONE. You lazy motherfuckers. You waste my time and make me not even want to see the fucking place because if you aren’t showing a sq/ft then that must mean its not very big right. The only reason you could intentionally do this is if you are trying to hide something about the house. This is like advertising a car for sale and not listing the number of doors or the HP. I swear 30-40% of the listings on Realtor.com do not have any indicafion of the sq/ft. Fuck this shit.
and the big one…
There is NO FUCKING EXCUSE for not including pictures of the main areas of the house in your online listing. NONE. Unless the house is fucking trashed or something. Or unless there is something you don’t want me to see. In the age of the $50 digital camera EVERY fucking house should have pictures. You would think I’m talking about $200K houses or something. No. I’m talking about houses between $350 and 450 K!!! WTF??? The selling agent stands to make 10K+ on the house but can’t be bothered to post fucking pictures?? There are pictures of a rickety ass table on craigslist that someone wants $15 for.
And when you DO have pictures, I don’t want to hear musak in the background and I absolutely fucking despise when they set up their slide shows to S L O W L Y F A D E in the pictures. It’s such a time waster and makes me not want to look at all the pictures.
If I was selling a house and my real estate agent didn’t even do these basic, menial tasks that a 10 year old could do I would fire their fucking ass.
As a buyer it just wastes my fucking time and infuritates me that I can’t see any stats on a house that looks nice in it’s only picture from the curb.
I feel you on this one. Especially, and I kid you not, listings that only include exterior shots (do you even own the property, or are you just a con artist who got her hands on a digicam?), or avoid the bedrooms and bathrooms while concentrating on the washer & dryer, boiler room, etc. Idiots.
It’s not just tear-downs. There are quite a few houses for sale here which have minimal details and no photos in their online listings that I know aren’t tear-downs. Considering that the cheapest house around here is $500K and many are $600K-$700K, that lack of minimal effort on the part of the seller’s agent is pretty hard to justify.
Find the tax assessor’s site for the counties you are interested in. Then, you can search on the address to find a map of the plot and the square footage of the house in question.
Quit going to a bunch of different realty sites to look at homes. Find a realtor in the area whose search engine is tied into the Multiple listing service. Here is an example of one such search engine (found at Jenny Pruitt’s Georgia site).
What?
How on earth does that even make sense? What could they possibly be trying to be accomplish? Is supposed to be an exciting mystery? (Do you have to go to the house blindfolded as well?)
I think they justify the idiotic law by claiming that Realtors could cause confusion by loosely defining what does and does not constitute “square-footage”.
Upon review, it looks like it may or not be a state law. Several Realtors have told me that it is, but someone just told me that it is not. Regardless, there is some reason why it is not done in most of the state. Maybe we can get to the bottom of it here.
I live on the other side of DC in Maryland and we have the same problem. I asked about this once and was told that they do not list the square footage because some people will include everything from closets to every other inch they can get. This started causing problems when people found out their houses were not as big as advertised.
I guess they just want the OP to show up so they can look for themselves. Doesn’t do you much good coming from out of town though.
My guess would be that they do this purposely, to force you to make an appointment to come and take a look at the house. Then the sales pitch ensues. Is that not likely?
Not in my experience. Most Realtors I deal with allow me to look around by myself while they wait in the living room. The pushier ones may follow me around, but I never get much of a huge “pitch”.
Now someone is telling me it is only against the law for agents in Georgia to provide square footage.
I feel your pain. This is what I ended up doing when we were searching for a house in Pittsburgh last summer. The real estate sites for Pittsburgh don’t have the info, the MLS listings our realtor sent us didn’t either, and I got the feeling that I would have had to resort to waterboarding to get a square footage number out of either of our realtors for any of the houses we looked at.
That said, square footage isn’t the whole story. Layout matters a lot. Two houses with the same square footage can “feel” very different in size, because of different layouts.
You have to do this when you’re buying a house. You’re crazy if you buy a house without having looked at it in person.
Online listings are nice, but even good ones are no substitute for going there and walking around the house. Even if it had pictures of every square inch of the house, the listing still wouldn’t have important information like how noisy the area is at various times of day, how solid the floors, doors, stair rails, etc, in the house feel, how hard or easy it is to get your car in and out of the garage or driveway at various times of day, whether there are odd smells in some areas of the house, how well the plumbing works in the kitchen and bathrooms, and stuff like that. Those things are important, and can be difficult or impossible to fix once you’ve bought the house.
If your realtor is giving you the hard sell, especially on houses you don’t think are suitable, get a different realtor. That shouldn’t be difficult in this market.
At least there is some standardization here. When I looked at houses listed by their owners I couldn’t believe the amount of mis-representation. In Indiana, at least, to call a room a bedroom it must have a closet and a standard size window. So a finished room in a basement with one little half window can not be listed as a bedroom. Also, you can’t count basement square footage in your total.
In just about every sell by owner home I saw, they overstated the bedrooms by one if not two by including parts of their basement that they had dry walled off in the bedroom total and often overstated total square footage as well.
As a matter of fact, I came to the conclusion that most list by owners types are not trying to save on the realtor’s cut so much as lie about their property in a way that a real realtor could never permit.
Here’s my deal. I’m in Ohio. My wife and I are taking a trip out there next weekend for a 2 day whirlwind tour of 25-35 houses. Because the market is all fucked up there are a million houses on the market out there, in our primary area, in our price range. So I need to cut down the list my wife made (85 houses) on Realtor.com, + listings that our realtor sent us down to a managable number of houses. We can’t take 5 trips out there before we buy a home so it we need to see real fucking contenders while we are out there this time. We are already pre-approved on the mortgage and every things. So, the only way for me to whittle the list down is by the info on the listing. One of the top considerations for us is the SQUARE FOOTAGE. And it’s FUCKED that they don’t show it on these houses. There are some that kind of meet me half way and at least list the sizes of the bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens, but not the total. I can deal with that because as long as the kids rooms are at least 12x12 and we have a good sized rec room I can at least say “Yeah, lets go look at that house”. But if the total sq/ft is less than 2300 sq/ft it’s an automatic no go. Most of these houses look the same size from the outside but have drastically different finished sq/ft. That’s why I need that basic information.
I think it’s just fucking lazy ass agents myself.
The reality is that people really don’t NEED an agent to FIND a home since 99% of the MLS can be found on several websites and that’s what the fucking agents send us listings from anyway. We only NEED an agent to broker the deal. Their commissions are fucking ridiculous for the tiny amount of work they do. But I would expect that they could squeeze an extra 7-8 minutes worth of work into the 2hrs total they probably spend on the avg client to put together a decent fucking listing online so people who DON’T LIVE THERE ALREADY can make a quick assessment.
There was already a thread on real estate agents a little bit ago so I won’t go back into that, but this online shit should be in ALOT better shape than it is by now. I question whether or not it is a conspiracy by the real estate industry to keep the web based shopping as useless as possible so people won’t question just what the fuck their agent actually does for them when they can go online and find houses with a few clicks of the mouse.
BOTTOM LINE: The real estate industry is in the same boat that the travel agents are in since the WWW has developed. Buyers don’t need agents to type shit in the computer anymore and find houses/flights for them when we can do it at home. At least the travel agents seem to have bowed out gracefully. I don’t hold my breath for the fucking real estate goons to do the same though.
I want to know, nay, expect to know the following before wasting my time:
[ul]
[li]price[/li][li]sq. ft.[/li][li]beds/baths/how many rooms[/li][li]heat/cooling source[/li][li]what the thing’s built out of, including the roof[/li][li]lot size[/li][li]property tax[/li][li]garage [/li][li]water source (I’m in the desert)[/li][li]exterior and interior pictures[/li][li]whether or not there’s an evil HOA and if so, what the fee is[/li][li]a link to the county so I can see the assessment and what the friggin’ thing sold for last and how many times it’s been [del]flipped[/del] sold in the past 5 years[/li][li]how many days on the market[/li][/ul]
I may have to go several places for all this stuff, Zillow and Cyberhome are not too accurate for value, but good for looking up previous sales and for seeing a bird’s eye view of the house, whether or not it’s near a main road, and what the neighborhood looks like from above. Redfin has the best information of any on-line realtor site, IMO, but I don’t think they’re available in the OP’s area.
homegain.com will often come up with the square footage of a house if you type in the address and zip code or city and state. That was really handy for us as first-time home buyers. I was able to enter the address of my childhood home and find out what its square footage was, for comparison.