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Getting Started

Is This Listing Real, or Just a Ghost?

Credit...Phil Marden for The New York Times

In an era when drop-down menus and mouse clicks are critical tools for a house hunt, one scenario in particular has become all too familiar to some buyers.

A buyer scans many online listings until a particular co-op catches her eye. It’s love at first page view: location, exposed brick kitchen walls, price.

But after contacting the listing agent to see that perfect-sounding home, she learns that it has already been rented or sold.

As a consolation prize, the agent offers to show a different apartment, swearing that it has nearly identical features. But the buyer quickly realizes, despondently, that it’s not even close to her first pick. She feels duped by an ad for something that she now suspects didn’t exist.

“Of course this happens, the bait-and-switch,” said Nikki Field, a longtime broker with Sotheby’s International Realty. “Brokers are looking for all ways possible to pull in clients.”

Not only does the tactic tarnish the profession, she explained, but it’s usually not effective.

“If you start with a bait-and-switch, these buyers will not be loyal,” Ms. Field said.

And if in recent months there have appeared to be more of these “ghost” listings — those that hauntingly linger, seeming as if they were available even though they’ve been sold, rented or otherwise taken off the market — it might be because agents are starved for inventory and have little else to post, brokers say. Some aggressive brokers even troll for clients by creating online ads that suggest a listing is their exclusive when in fact it belongs to someone else. This often happens with new developments and is also more common in Brooklyn, where more agents are working individually, than in Manhattan, brokers say.

Then again, it’s also possible that buyers are more acutely aware of the problem because more of them are contacting listing agents directly when embarking on a search, thanks to a profusion of online databases, brokers add.

But what is clear is that those databases, especially the national ones that lump together listings from smaller brokerages, don’t always offer clean data, said Rick Wohlfarth, the founder of Wohlfarth & Associates, a three-decade-old boutique firm in Manhattan.

“There is not enough policing of the sites going on at all,” Mr. Wohlfarth said.

Although advertising one unit and showing another may be unethical, it doesn’t rise to the level of breaking the law.

Agents are free to market a home until a contract is signed by both buyer and seller. Until that time, even if there is an oral agreement, sellers generally want agents to continue to show their homes. Besides, under the rules of many online databases, an agent usually has an entire day to update a site, and so a brief delay is permitted, people who run some of the databases point out.

New York State’s business regulations provide only general guidelines about how homes should be marketed, stating that “advertisements shall include an honest and accurate description of the property to be sold or leased,” according to the Department of State, which licenses and regulates salespeople and brokers.

So online listings in New York City are largely monitored by the real estate industry itself, with substantial oversight by the Real Estate Board of New York, a trade group. It represents about 15,000 agents in the city — about 12,000 of whom are focused on home sales. More than 53,000 agents in the city are licensed by the state.

All the board’s member listings, which the board believes represent about 90 percent of those in the city, are funneled into the board’s listing service, or R.L.S., and many wind up at NY1Residential.com, a public online database on which the board partners with NY1, the cable news channel.

Members sometimes decide, however, to tuck away some listings on the board’s website so that they can be viewed only by member brokers, said Steven O. Goldschmidt, a senior vice president of Warburg Realty who also serves as a chairman of the board’s listing service. This typically happens when a brokerage wants to narrow the audience for a specific listing rather than broadcast it widely.

In the spirit of “co-broking,” or cooperation among agents, Mr. Goldschmidt said, every listing, regardless of where it ultimately sits, must be updated with 24 hours of a sale, unless the sale happens on a weekend or a postal holiday, real estate board rules state.

But no single official is responsible for keeping an eye out for problems; the board relies mostly on complaints from its members.

If agents fail to update a listing, they can be punished, though the process is roundabout.

After a complaint is lodged, a majority of a subcommittee must agree that wrongdoing occurred before any hearing is held. Real estate board fines for breaking a rule can be steep: A first offense for violating board procedures costs $500, a third offense $5,000; for five offenses, an agent can be expelled from the real estate board for good.

Even so, there is no specific policy on how much anyone should be fined for posting a misleading listing. Fines for ghost listings are rare, as are complaints, officials say. In fact, “I can’t remember any in 2013,” Mr. Goldschmidt said.

He ascribed that scarcity more to the fact that agents were acting ethically than to any lack of vigilance by the board. He also pointed out that firms tend to keep close tabs on their agents, since their deals result in revenue for the firm; along the same lines, brokers have an incentive to announce closings, to claim their commission checks.

“The end result is full disclosure,” Mr. Goldschmidt said, “but it involves a lot of self-correction and self-discipline.”

Some members, however, say the board needs to do more. “You can call and complain,” said Donna Olshan, the president of Olshan Realty, a boutique brokerage on the Upper East Side, and a real estate board member. “But there is really no police force, so the consumer is poorly served. In my mind it is more about sloppiness than bait-and-switch, but it’s a big problem, and it’s not going away anytime soon.”

Ms. Olshan, whose firm also has an office in Westchester County, points to that region’s chief online offering, Hudson Gateway Multiple Listing Service, as a more effective online database. Serving 11,000 agents and also used by public, the site is frequently updated by agents, she said.

But even though agents who use Hudson Gateway can be fined $50 if they don’t update their listings within 24 hours, those fines too are rare, a fact that Gary Connolly, the listing service’s director, attributes to self-regulation. “The good thing about having 11,000 members is that they all tell on each other,” he said.

To avoid ghost listings, buyers might instead turn to aggregation search engines like Streeteasy.com, whose information can sometimes be more current than what appears on brokerage websites, said Susan Daimler, general manager of Streeteasy, which was purchased by the national site Zillow last year.

Knowing that consumers often start their searches on Streeteasy, brokers often go there first to mark listings as “sold,” before doing so on their own sites, Ms. Daimler said. “There’s a lot of on-the-fly updating going on,” she said.

In addition, brokers say, buyers might keep in mind that ghost listings mostly lurk in the $1 million and under category, where listings are more plentiful.

And, they note, ghosts are far more common with rentals than for-sale properties and are more rampant on sites like Craigslist, which has little formal oversight.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section RE, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Is This Listing Real, or Just a Ghost?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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