How to make the real-estate market more useful and more honest

While I haven’t seriously spent any time shopping for a house, I occasionally do look at the real estate listings for my area just to see what’s available. Every time I do, I am struck by how pathetically uninformative and frustratingly closed-off the information is. The multiple listings service does an okay job letting me search on one site to get listings from lots of different realtors, but the resulting hits, which offer no street address and a couple tiny, grainy photos, are hardly enough to let me know which ones I’d actually want to spend time looking into.

My brother once told me that if people actually knew what a house was really like before they bought it, no-one would ever buy a house. There’s definitely some truth there; the more time I’ve spent in a place, the more little problems I’ve come across. But like he said, every house has its share of problems. Nothing’s exempt, and the best that you can hope for is that you notice the problems early enough that you can deal with them before they become major.

So right now, the housing market in this respect is almost entirely in the hands of the sellers. If you can hide the bad stuff well enough that potential buyers don’t notice it on a walkthrough, you can unload your old shack for more than it’s worth and saddle the new owners with the cost of fixing things up. And I’m not talking about major stuff here like dangerous wiring or shoddy plumbing — any half-decent home inspector will catch that before the sale is final. I’m talking about the little stuff, the fact that the molding is loose around the livingroom doors, or that the shower head is always getting clogged, or that whenever the weather’s warm you get dozens of houseflies from who-knows-where.

So, as a buyer, what’s to be done? We need some way to work together, share information about these houses that goes far, far beyond the handful of vague datapoints in an MLS listing. We need to take photos of the excessive wood-rot around the windows, the cracked linoleum behind the toilet, the gaps in the flooring that the seller is trying to hide behind his armchair, and let each other know about it. We need to do what we can to level the playing field by sharing what we can find about properties for sale and, in doing so, attempt to reveal their true values.

We need a social real-estate information sharing portal. A site that lets us say “See this listing? The actual address is 123 Main St. in Somewhereville. I went there and took two dozen photos — here they are. And you know how the realtor’s photo makes it look like an idyllic wooded lot? Yeah, they’re not showing you that it borders a busy road and has a mosquito-filled swamp a hundred feet behind it.” We need to post what we saw, what the owners told us, and what we thought, in order to let other potential buyers know exactly what they’re getting into.

Tenants can use it too. “I rented this property for two years, and let me tell you, unless you’re ready to be saddled with twenty grand in renovations it’s not worth your time.”

And eventually, if enough people share information about these properties and do their best to show the world what the properties are really like, sellers will learn that it’s in their best interests to be up front about stuff. When you decide to sell your house, you log onto the info-sharing site and say “it’s not perfect — here are the problems — but there’s lots of good stuff, too.” When people see that you’re being honest, they’ll be much more willing to work with you to reach an equitable agreement.

And then people will know what the houses for sale are like, but be able to make an honest comparison, and will still be willing to buy them because they’ll really know what they’re getting into.