Don’t worry, we’re not going to drag ourselves through the Glowball Warmening debate here.
This is just the economy. Nothing important.
I have a very disturbing email that came in this evening. It alleges out-and-out fraudulent reporting of home sales in one of the regional MLS systems. That is, prices paid that are in fact much lower than the “sold” prices reported in the MLS.
The person in question claims to have seen over 100 of these in his area. I have copies of two, and it appears, from the evidence that I have, that at least for those two the claim is accurate.
One in particular I was able to pull the auction data on. It “sold” under reserve, is listed as sold in the MLS at ~25% higher than the “sold” bid, and the premium is disclosed as 5%. This property also has a 90-day “anti-flip” provision on it, implying that the paper may be held by one of the GSEs. (It’s a nice-looking place, incidentally.)
The original writer warns that if you are working your way through any real estate transaction that involves using comparable prices (aka: 90% of real estate transactions), you need to check out the comps used for yourself. Do not believe anyone in the market area until you do or you could be paying way too much for your region/area.
Personally, I don’t take ANY statistic the dot.gov puts out as valid. The various political administrations have been lying with statistics for so long that they just don’t know how to do their jobs any other way.
Tobacco Road!
It occurred to me later that this will be a bonanza for the lawyers. Anyone who “went underwater” and was foreclosed upon now probably has a cause in action against the system that the “Realtors” use to value homes, and the banking system for accepting that phony data when they should have known better, and maybe even folks who simply paid too much for a house in the spendy areas will start suing.
This has the potential to finally crash the real estate market, and finally take the economy into a severe depression.
The dot.gov would have to act quickly to give immunity to the realtors & appraisers & bankers, but then, might that not be an ex-post-facto law?