The post-mortem lexicon: What all the acronyms mean and why they matter.

As I’ve noted, I will often post-mortem closed listings on Bloodhound Realty’s Facebook page. Yesterday, I did nine houses in bulk:

Here’s a single closing from this morning, explicated in greater detail:

I love those two little boxes of dates and numbers. Sometimes I have to read the full listing history to figure out what happened, but 95% of real estate transactions are perfectly summarized by those two boxes. They are a residential real estate sale’s obituary, and my one-line summary – e.g., 190 DOM, 87.80% net-SP/OLP – is that transaction’s epitaph.

That’s morbid, so don’t even get me started on Expired and Cancelled listings. Meanwhile, here’s a lexicon to explain all the acronyms:

ADOM is Agent Days on Market, so it’s just DOM. There is a CDOM, Cumulative Days on Market, for exceptionally badly marketed properties. 

SP is Sales Price, what it sold for, excluding concessions – which many of these closings had. If I say net-SP/OLP, I’m subtracting the concessions. That is, I am arriving at the seller’s gross proceeds before commissions, closing and parasitic costs – so call it another 6.5%-7.5% off that gross number to get to the net payoff.

OLP is Original List Price, which may have been eclipsed by many subsequent price reductions, each of which is known in its turn as LP, List Price.

Note that, typically, if an agent gloats, “Sold at list price!,” he means the reduced LP, not OLP. In that circumstance, he probably doesn’t want you looking into DOM or concessions, either.

The kind of reporting I’m doing closing-by-closing, as Cautionary Tales, should be built into the MLS. There is no objective way to evaluate buyer’s agents, but listers sort themselves over time by those two numbers, DOM and SP/OLP.