So after almost 6 months of looking online for houses my pet peeve list for these online listings is pretty big!! I've narrowed it down to my all-time top five most annoying things about online listings that I absolutely cannot stand!!! I'm sure a lot of you house-hunters out there will agree with me on this and hopefully you'll find solace in the fact that someone else besides you thinks they are annoying. Feel free to add to my list in the comment section!! Maybe we'll strike a cord with some of these agents out there and get these things fixed ...
1) PICTURES - The entire picture aspect of these listings just bug the window treatments out of me!!! Don't they know - no pics, no looks!! Even if the house description is out of this world and the house is only 12 bucks with a $10,000 government grant option ... if I can't see the house I'm moving on (ok maybe if the house was 12 dollars I'd take a quick peak)! And what is it with these listings where you see the outside of the house and the rest of the images are of the train station, or the nearby waterfront. I'm happy to see that if I took mass transit to work there is a train station very near by - but if the house is a P.O.S. the train isn't going to do me much good. Ooh and another thing .. So you find a cool looking house and you click on the listing for more info and see that there's 18 pictures with it. If you're like me you get super excited, until you click on the pictures and realize it's just the same 6 pictures posted 3 times. What is up with that?? And the quality of some of the images? They're awful!! It's great that there are 10 pictures of your listing but if I can't make out a window from a fireplace what good is it?! There should be some kind of requirement where you need to have at least one (decent) picture of all the major areas of the house - the front, the kitchen, the living room, one bedroom, one bathroom, and the backyard - before you can post the listing online.
2) # of bathrooms - I hope we can all agree on the fact that a half bath, which consists of just a toilet and a sink, doesn't count as a full bath. If it counted as a full bath it would have a tub and/or a shower AND BE CALLED A FULL BATH!! If you say in the description that the house has 1 and a half baths then you should not put the number 2 in the bathroom section. That would be a lie. You wouldn't say a house has 4 bedrooms when in reality it only has two bedrooms and two closets. It's misleading and doesn't make me want to continue reading your listing because if you don't know the difference between a full and half bath then I'm not so sure I want to buy a house from you.
3) Lack of info in the breakdown section - I absolute hate it when I click into a listing that says 4 bedrooms/2 baths and doesn't give the square feet of the house or the lot size. Ok 4 bedrooms are great but if its in a 500 square foot house I'll probably pass. Or when it says 3 bedrooms and "--" in the bathroom section. Does the house not have a bathroom? Why would you put your listing up if you didn't have all the information on the house to begin with? That's not a good way to sell houses!
4) When the street view isn't actually of the house your looking at - Ok this relates specifically to the Trulia website since they're the only one who has this option. When it works I love it - saves me from having to go to Google maps to see if there's a street view available for the house. But when it doesn't work it's so frustrating! I was looking at a listing a couple of weeks ago and click on the street view link - it took me 20 minutes of looking to realize that the house I was interested in was further down on the street and the little orange Google map dude wouldn't go down that far. So why put it on the website and give me hope for nothing?! I understand that its at the discretion of Google whether there is a street view of the house or not, so if Google map doesn't have a street view option then just put NO STREET VIEW.
5) When the "days listed on ..." isn't correct - Now because I'm a listing junkie (Hello, my name is Elizabeth and I'm addicted to looking up houses online) I've signed up to get automated emails from a million, give or take a few hundred thousand, different companies. I know what you're thinking - excessive? - but you'd be surprised the variety of houses I get that way! Any who ... one morning I'll get an email from Weichert with a listing for 123 Main St. that says it just came on the market, then I'll go to Zillow and it says it's been on the market for 75 Days, then I'll go on Trulia and it says 156 days! MAKE UP YOUR MIND!! The number of days a house has been on the market is actually pretty important. It lets you know that perhaps there is something wrong with the house that they're not letting on, or maybe they're going to lower the price soon, or if they just came on the market they probably aren't ready to budge on the price anytime soon.
Ok I'm done complaining for now! Let me know what you think about my list and tell me what some of your pet peeves are!!
Haha love it! I went to a house that said 1 and 1/2 baths. The 1/2 bath was a toilet in the laundry room in the basement. Apparently the wash sink for the washing machine was the sink. A toliet is not a half bath. It's a toliet in the basement lol
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