Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Answer me this?

Quote of the day (regarding the practice of "churning" listings to make it appear like they are "fresher" than they are):
If I went to the meat counter at my local grocer and bought a package of hamburger that was two weeks old but marked as packaged yesterday, that would be fraud. If I bought a used car that showed 50,000 km on the odometer but had really been rolled back from 200,000 km - fraud as well. So, why is it perfectly acceptable to do the same thing with houses?

VicREBear
H/T to comments at Victoria's Truth.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great quote. Some salespeople will use whatever tactic works for them - morality is not necessarily a consideration....

Ryan said...

It's not a particularly apt analogy, because houses don't "go off", nor are they changing the manufacturing date. The amount of time since something was put up for sale is not the same as its age. Sure it's dishonest, but days on market doesn't actually affect the quality of the house.

A car with 200,000km will be much closer to the scrapyard than one with 50,000km. A 10 year old house is still a 10 year old house whether it's been on the market for 20 days or 200 days.

Anonymous said...

Aleks, you're absolutely right. My analogy isn't perfect, but was intended to point out the similarity in thought processes that would be necessary on the part of the butcher, car salesman or realtor in order to perpetrate the acts described. It's all fraud at heart, with equal measure of intent to deceive, and the realtors should be held culpable just as the individuals in my examples would be.

VicREBear