Myth: If you see a home online, that means it’s available

Posted by Shawn Bhakta on Tuesday, March 15, 2022 at 8:30 AM By Shawn Bhakta / March 15, 2022 Comment

If you see a home online, that means it's available. That's today's myth! Is that Myth true?

Welcome to this episode of Myth vs the Truth.

Many major real estates website such as Zillow or Redfin or Realtor.com, utilize the information to collect data in order for them to capture the lead and sell it forward to the real estate agents. For example, they will keep the active listings, the pending listings and even the previously sold listings just to obtain that information.

When a property has a contract, they can have different status. For example, it can be pending or can be active with a contract.

In both of them, they will show in those major sites as you have an active property. But what happens, when the property is active with a contract, you have a contract in place. But the owners are looking for a backup offer. Do you really want to be the buyer of the backup offer or you want to be the only buyer?

Another thing, when a seller gets a contract, the seller and the listing agent for a time period, they may still keep it as an active. Why?

Because it may be in a negotiation stage. They have multiple offers, but the final signature is not done yet. So in that case, technically the property is not available because they have multiple offers, but they are negotiating with one of the buyers. On the other side also, sometimes they have a signed contract but they still keep it active until that property passes the inspection and so. So that's why they don't have to go through the whole contract negotiation process and everything again. So they want to keep it as an active until the inspection is done, negotiation done. Okay, now the properties are off the market.

So now you know if you see a property online, it does not mean that it's still available. Hopefully this information help you to make the right decision and to see what is good and it's not good online. See you next week in another episode of Myth vs the Truth.