The short answer is you’re using the wrong date criteria.
You shouldn’t be using Sold Date. You need to use Processed Date – beginning on the first of the month and ending on the last day of the month – and your solds will line up with the Board’s solds. (Over time, the odd sale does collapse, but if you’re checking shortly after stats are released, they should be a perfect match.)
Huh? What’s Processed Date? Why does the Board use that? And where do I find it?
We have published this information in the past, but there are some occasions when things bear repeating. Especially when the Fraser Valley market experiences a dramatic change as we’ve seen since mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of physical distancing on the home buying and selling process.
The decrease in sales and new listings has been sharp and a number of members have been logging in to Paragon to reproduce the sold data as published in our Monthly Statistics Package and when their numbers don’t match ours, they understandably are picking up the phone.
Why Sold Date is not the date when a sale is ‘counted’ statistically
As you know, Sold Date is the date you filled in on your MLS® contract indicating when your buyers and sellers came to a final agreement, but it’s not the date that the Board counts the deal as a sale.
Think about the logic for a moment. How can the Board count a sale that it doesn’t know about yet?
A contract may be signed but remember that sales are not reported to the Board until all subjects are removed. Brokers and their staff still need to review it, and only when they sign off on it does it get submitted to the Board. Then our MLS® team does another thorough review and once that’s done, the sale is officially processed and it’s on that day, that it becomes ‘a statistic’. This can be a couple of days or even a couple of weeks after the contractual “Sold Date”, depending on when the office submits the sale and if it’s sent in on a weekend.
The Board has been using Processed Date for statistical purposes going back decades, possibly even as far back as the introduction of the MLS® in the 50’s. (Worth noting that REBGV uses the same date criteria for solds too.)
Now that you understand why you need to use Processed Date to search sold listings as reflected in our monthly stats, we’ll explain how to do it. (Of course, you can still use Sold Date to search solds, but the sales totals won’t jive with our month-end statistics.)
If you’ve ever customized a Search in Paragon by adding in other non-default fields – i.e. P.I.D.#, Price Per SQFT, Days on Market and so on (there are literally dozens of additional fields) – Processed Date is just another one of those Available Fields that you can add to your Search as a Primary, Secondary or Advanced Criteria.
More information:
Click here for a step-by-step guide to Adding and Using Processed Date to search SOLDS in Paragon.
Source: FVREB Communications