Mark up
Anybody want to buy a bridge? In an ingenious sales technique in no way reminiscent of a subplot from “The Office,” a house flipper in TRD’s beloved hometown of Austin, Texas, priced a sale at twice its value, then “marked it down.” Twenty-three times.
To state the obvious, those price drops were not sincere reassessments of the value of the home.
Incremental price corrections
The price was regularly reduced by nonsensically small amounts of money (my favorite was the two times it was reduced by $1 and $5; you know, I think I’m prepared to skip my latte this morning and buy a better house) and on occasion also artificially inflated. When I say artificially inflated, I mean once it was “accidentally” raised to *insert Dr. Evil voice here* 5 million dollars, then “fixed,” one increment at a time.
The goal, if that’s what we’re calling this, was apparently sort of a My First SEO strategy.
Every price reduction, even the ones I could pay for out of the cushions of my thrift store couch, increased the listing’s visibility on aggregator sites and other applications designed to keep customers informed of meaningful changes in listings.
An outsiders opinion
I am not a Realtor, and I do not regularly flip houses. What I do is wrangle data and live indoors. From the perspective of a communications wonk and a real estate customer, therefore, seriously, don’t.
Nonsense of this kind is the best way to draw the worst kind of attention.
House flipping already has a reputation for being full of high-energy, low-ability amateurs and general Glengarry fail. This is how you confirm that reputation to any customer smart enough to subtract. Worse, this is how to screw pricing information and turn aggregator tools, which are vital for any self-respecting Realtor’s business, into sub-Craigslist spam farms.
Questionable practice
I’m tempted to call this “gaming the system” but frankly, that’s generous. As shown by the uniformly hostile response in the comments on a story regarding the aforementioned bridge, this doesn’t even rise to the level of a cheat code. This is typing the cheat code in wrong. To be clear, this practice is absolutely legal.
It’s just a painfully unsubtle attempt to hack a decent system. Not a good look.
#markuptomarkdown
