Tucson Real Estate Urban Legend
July 21, 2008
Post Tags: Tucson-monsoon-season.--Tucson-Toad-stools , Tucson-Urban-Legend , tucson_mls
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Too Many Zero Can A Legend Make
I wrote earlier this week about waiting for a data fix in the Tucson MLS. Back on July 3, 2008 a property was set to closed tranaction with a sale price of $95,500,000. I knew when I saw it that was too many zeros as the end of the sale price. If this “AS IS” property sold for Ninety Five Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars I’m sure it would have made the news.
While I was waiting for this entry to be fixed another popped up. A mobile home sold for 57,000,000. Combined these two entrys made the average sale price for July with 186 properties sold to be $1,186,000.
Now even the most casual observer will know that this is not accurate or even close to accurate.
All week I’ve been waiting to do an update for July closed transactions, but it is impossible to get an accurate picture with these transactions entered the way they were. The mobile home entry was fixed the day I noticed it. The other was just fixed this afternoon. (A fine was issued for not fixing it in a timely manner). (this part written last week)
Data Pulls are a Snapshot in Time
This has had me thinking all week. What if someone pulled data from the Tucson MLS between July 3 and July 11, 2008 as a part of a much bigger data pull. Say for a national study on housing, or a study on “How Real Estate Markets in Arizona are doing in June 2008″
If data was pulled for a national study those bogus entries would have skewed the final results.
As it is they made it difficult to get average statistics or pull a CMA if the properties in question were in the same location.
If it sounds too good to be true . . .
One thing I’ve noted over time. If it sounds to good to be true it usually isn’t. But if it sound outlandish it isn’t true, but often is accepted as if it is. And another Urban Legend is born.
Oh, and we have really big toad stools here in Tucson during the Monsoon Season.
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I’ve seen things like that happen before. I called on a property once I had clients interested in after seeing it online & while we figured the price was wrong (it was listed for $29k instead of $290k) still wanted some info on it. The agent knew it was wrong but left it that way for months! I don’t know when/if he ever changed it…but it does happen more than you’d expect!
August 13th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
What bothers me is how long it usually takes to get these kinds of mistakes corrected. An error that major should have been a peice of cake to catch. Anyways I just get sick of people doing a poor job and seemingly not carring.