That doesn't make any sense - if your mailing address was a PO Box would he list that as your physical address?

If they post mainly on the web, does a mapquest search lead to your house or 20 miles away? Maybe linking to a mapquest search would help? What address is going to help people locate your home directly? Are there any newspapers that have a real estate section? You may need some old fashioned advertising.

I wonder why he's being so difficult? If you don't sell your house he doesn't get paid. Did you look for a realtor that specializes in rural listings? Did you ask him about this problem before you signed (or did you only realize it after the listing was up?)

Do you have an MLS #?

I'd tell him that you agree with his belief that people use the Internet to find and screen houses.
And that therefore, he needs to find a way to fix the listing so that it shows up in the City, not the Town.
And that if HE can't fix it, you'll need to terminate his contract and re-list with someone who can.

If the house is in "the town" it is what it is. Unfortunately, if he changes your MLS listing to reflect "the city" address, it would be false advertising and against most MLS's to do so. Are you in the same school district as the 'city'? If yes, your house will come up when people search that way. Not everyone searches by town, some search by zip code, would your house come up that way in a search? You're basically asking him to make your house look like its in the city when in fact it is not. Perhaps his comments in the remarks section can say, "walking distance to the city" with the beneift of quiet town living?

He may not be even targeting "city dwellers or town dwellers", perhaps he is targeting people wanting an older home and that is how he will base his advertising. Im assuming this is what your home is since its very close to the city line. In that case, they would probably want the town and the city being so close would be perfect. I wouldnt worry so much about "how things show up", there are a million different ways people search for a home.

Do you have an info tube with flyers?

There was a case near me where a buyer sued a real estate agent for saying that the house was in one town, but really wan't. I actually think the buyer lost, but I'm guessing real estate agents don't want to open themselves up to something like that.

katinka-katinka: "There was a case near me where a buyer sued a real estate agent for saying that the house was in one town, but really wan't. I actually think the buyer lost, but I'm guessing real estate agents don't want to open themselves up to something like that."

By any chance..was that the one in Montville?

I followed that law suit...and I actually sided with the RE on that one...if I recall correctly, if you looked on a map, it was clear the property was in the Towaco section of Montville Township...not the Montville section....

If so, this link below seems to indicate that the buyers won...although IMO, that is a BIG stretch of the consumer fraud act...when in NJ thousands of people donÂt have an an address that reflects the town in which they live...

We live in a municipality of one name...in a village of a different name within that municipality.

There is no mail delivery to homes from our village post officeÂ..its too tiny....so our mailing address is that of the adjacent borough. However, we DO have our very own tiny village zip code...but any mail delivered to that zip code requires a PO Box.

To complicate things further, there are two municipalities with our municipality's name in NJ....in two different counties...so we have found our name listed under the one in the other countyÂ.at least 50 miles away.

Our phone lines come out of the nearest small city...so on various internet phone directories, we are listed as living in that city.

Also, Âour mailing address zip code of the adjacent borough is ALSO the zip code of the next municipality over.

The other municipality mailing address zip code is that of another borough altogether.....so, we have seven different names to deal with...

This is why I sided with the REA in this one. :-)

NJ Âgreat place to live if you are in the witness protection programÂLOL!

Here is a link that might be useful: Misrepresentation of Location of House Can be Violation of Consumer Fraud Act

I found an article that said although a jury decided that the agent, by not using the term Towaco when describing the location of the home, constituted an "affirmative misrepresentation" under the Consumer Fraud Act. ...the judge decided that the family suffered no measurable loss. Apparently they were claiming that the house should have sold for 10% less...asking for 70K...but an appraiser testified that homes in the Towaco section of Montville Township sold for the same as and appreciated as much as those in the Montville section.

BTW...they are listed as still living in that same house five years later....so, I guess a Towaco mailing address is not such a burden after all. ;-)

I agree that an infotube is a very, very, very good idea and probably the best answer to the issue of people driving by and not being able to find the listing later. You can just print out the public MLS page or make up a nice flyer - I made a nice one up just with Microsoft Word, although it took me a while because I had no clue what I was doing. There are templates at Microsoft.com that were super handy.

You can also put the MLS # right on the sign - we see that quite a lot in my area as an alternative to infoboxes which are still pretty rare here. Me, I like infoboxes. We've gone through a LOT of flyers, far too many for just "nosy neighbors" to be taking them all. You can't see our house from the road so I bullied my agent into the infobox. I am convinced that is why the house next to me took so very long to sell (it's even less visible than ours), you had no idea what was back there.

I would talk to some other agents about what, if anything, can be done about your location/search issue.

We live in a small village within a major city. Our mailing address is city, even though we're located in the village. In the MLS, it's definitely listed as village -- so it's not the mailing address that determines MLS.

In the lawsuit, the Realtor didn't point out that the house was located within a less desirable township -- I'm not suggesting that at all. Only that it be the text of the listing that states the town, and that it be filed with the city listings.

Another thing Realtors around here do is list 'Village Area' instead of Village, meaning nearby but not inside. They generally group RE listings that way in the city paper, and that's where a lot of locals do their open house searches.