That’s a tricky question; and one that I get ALL the time. As Realtors, we often go out of our way to be the gatekeepers of information. It’s a defense mechanism we use as an industry to help us from going the way of the travel agent, er, dodo.
In the past, if you wanted to know if a home was already under contract but not yet fully pending, you would either have to call the listing agent or call your own agent and ask them to peek inside the MLS. It works like this: a normal real estate transaction has three phases in our MLS. It is either Active, Pending, or Sold. But in our area there is a limbo time in between Active and Pending. It’s called Active With Contingency. This means that the seller has accepted an offer on the house but there is something that must happen before the agent switches the status in the MLS to fully pending. Typically it will be one of the following:
- awaiting home inspection
- awaiting financing approval
- awaiting appraisal
- awaiting bank approval of short sale offer
- awaiting sale of buyer’s current home
- awaiting some external contingency (job transfer, parental viewing, etc)
Agents can see these contingency flags inside the MLS, but YOU CAN’T see the flag on the consumer side of Realtracs (or Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com, or anywhere else that I know of).
But now you too can see the contingency status. At least you can on the NestingInNashville.com search results pages. Starting this week, if a home is already under contract it will have a notation like this on the results page:
Is that home under contract?
Now isn’t that handy?? For us all!!
