Freshening an Old Listing, and Other Tips for Worried Sellers

"W e live in Baltimore and are trying to sell our house," writes a reader. "My agent tells me that my listing has to be withdrawn from the local multiple listing service for at least six months, otherwise the number of days on market will carry forward from my old listing to a new listing. Our house has been on the market for nine months and we're trying to find a way not to show that in the MLS."

It's a rough time to be a home seller. Unfortunately, there are more people trying to sell their homes than folks who want to buy them. That means there's a lot of "excess inventory" -- unsold houses, if you're looking to get around the jargon -- that has to be sold before the housing market turns around.

Sellers are desperate to show their homes in as good a light as possible. One sticking point is that today's multiple listing services track how long a home has been for sale. And, as the reader points out, there is some concern that the technology employed by these systems will continue to monitor a property, even if it has been pulled off the market.

So does a Baltimore house listed in the local multiple listing service have to be off the market for six months in order to get a new number? No.

According to Jonathan Hill, vice president of business development for Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, which covers the Baltimore-Washington area, the reader's agent is providing incorrect information.

"At MRIS, if a new listing for a particular property is added 91 days after any previous listing was withdrawn or expired, it will be considered a 'new' listing. The history of days any previous listing was on the market will not attach to this new listing," Hill wrote in an e-mail. Until earlier this year, MRIS required that a listing be off for 180 days before it could be listed again as new.

A spokesperson for the National Association of Realtors said that each local multiple listing service develops its own rules regarding how long a property is tracked after it is pulled off the market. In some markets, you will have to wait a month, in others several months. You can double-check your agent's information on this point by chatting with the managing broker in the office or by calling the local service directly.

Freshening up a listing by withdrawing it and relisting it several months later is a trick that has been used for a long time. It is particularly popular when properties have languished from one year into the next because the numbers assigned within a multiple listing service correlate to the year, and sometimes the date, the property is listed.

In other words, if you listed your property in 2007 and you don't want a 2007 listing number, you can pull the property off the market and relist it with a 2008 number.

But whether the listing is old or new probably won't make as much of a difference as the condition, the price and how the local economy is functioning.

Baltimore, like Miami, Phoenix, Las Vegas, the Washington area and almost the entire state of Michigan, among other areas, has too many sellers and not enough buyers. Relisting your home might entice some people to take another look, but it doesn't mean that the house will sell any more quickly. It won't, for example, fix the fact that there are a bunch of identical houses in your neighborhood or subdivision for sale, half of them foreclosures, with banks undercutting your price.

If you hire a real estate agent who belongs to the multiple listing service, you'll have to live by the service's rules regarding relisting your property. But if you're a seller, there are a few things you can do to try to help your situation: