Jenifer Graham, of Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, has a good article out on the dispute between those — generally home sellers and real estate agents — who are determined to keep sale prices confidential, and other parties who believe that information wants to be free.
Until Graham contacted me for my opinion, I had no idea that so many states do keep prices private.
SALT LAKE CITY — In a nation increasingly worried about privacy, Utah guarantees its citizens a courtesy that most other states don’t: the right to keep the selling price of a home a secret.
And it’s not alone.
Texas, Alaska, Missouri, Louisiana and Mississippi, in addition to Utah and Idaho, are considered non-disclosure states, potentially costing those states millions of dollars in property taxes and giving players in the real estate market a monopoly on information.
The rules vary from state to state, but in Utah when a home changes hands, only real-estate agents and lenders know the final price, along with the seller and buyer. That means local governments, national real-estate websites and gossipy neighbors don’t.
The longstanding practice is an anomaly in a society where there are few secrets anymore.
I’m all for full disclosure, myself. For decades, our real estate firms kept sales data to themselves, allowing them a monopoly on that information and forcing buyers to come to them for buying advice, which not surprisingly was often tilted in favor of houses on the market that just happened to be listed by the broker itself. Greenwich brokers fought the MLS, fought the introduction of listing directories that allowed competing firms to learn what the others had going, then fought Zillow, Realtor.com, and any internet posting of anything relating to their listings at all. It’s been a long fight to introduce transparency into this mess, and our Association is still manipulating data, but we’re much closer than we were before. And without knowledge of actual sales data, buyers and their representatives are at the mercy of the gatekeepers.
Graham quotes me in her article as a supporter of such openness, and I am, but the money quote — literally — belongs to an opponent, who justly fears that disclosing sale prices is just inviting the taxman to appear on the doorstep:
Steve Theobald, a real-estate broker in Salt Lake City, has a personal reason to oppose disclosure. When he moved to Utah from Maryland, he had to pay a $20,000 transfer tax on the sale of his Maryland home. “I was happy to find out there wasn’t going to be any transfer tax in Utah,” Theobald said.
Theobald believes that nondisclosure is the primary reason Utah doesn’t have a transfer tax. “They don’t tax because they don’t have the data,” he said. “The second you give a politician data about money, they’re going to find a way to tax it.”
It’s a very well-written article, and Graham presents an objective view of both sides of the argument. Highly recommended.
