Actually, Utah joins six other states with this one. If you have bought or sold your home in one of the other 43 you too will seem this a strange one.
It is that Utah is a non disclosure state. In other words there is no publicly recorded record of what a property sold for. That is unless it sold through the MLS. Even then sellers can place a written request that the MLS not disclose the sales price.
How would Yoda respond to this one? "Stunning that is".
The only upside to this policy that I can see is a tax issue. If the price is not recorded how can the sale be taxed? In King County, Washington State for example, their is a 1.76% excise tax. It is collected at funding and recorded in the county records. There is no way to escape this tax as it is a law to record the sales price. Those who try to avoid it by non recording face stiff fines and penalties.
This leaves a Utah appraiser without an important tool. This makes pricing a home less of a science and more of an art. This also makes a case that the traditional agent approach of pressing the seller to reduce the price if it doesn't sell in a certain amount of time a bad approach for the seller. Traffic drives prices up, lack of traffic drives prices down. So pricing a home to the sellers advantage coupled with a unique plan for traffic becomes of paramount importance when seeking to get top dollar and in seeking to move the home quickly.
In speaking with an appraiser today I am told that banks are not accepting the paperwork from escrow as a comparable on sales closed outside of the MLS. The reason, potential fraud, as these documents are easily forged or falsified. Is this to mean that people actually do this? They do.
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