When pulling house off market, how long is long enough?

How do you define "days on market" for property listings? It would seem that number would be a pretty simple one to track -- uh, the number of days since the home was first listed for sale?

Wrong. The answer is "it depends."

Back in 2006, Inman News looked at some brewing controversy over days on market as it pertained to a practice known as "re-listing," in which agents pull listings off the market and re-list in order to reset the number of days on market to zero and make the listing look newer in the eyes of other agents and buyers.

That period between pulling a listing and putting it back on the market could be called "days off the market," or "time out." And this week, a related issue has come up in Washington, D.C., where a local business journal is reporting that MRIS, the major MLS serving the area, has decided to decrease from 180 to 90 the number of days a property is required to be off the market before the MLS resets the days on market number to zero when it is re-listed.

The Washington Business Journal quotes a local buyer's broker, Stephen Israel, as saying, "It's absolutely a knee-jerk reaction to the market… It's great for the seller who can't sell their house, they get a clean slate in 90 days instead of 180." Israel is president of Buyer's Edge in Bethesda, Md.

MRIS told the Journal it was simply part of an ongoing policy review and that the 180 days was an arbitrary figure selected in 1993.

Regardless, days on market is a contested issue among industry participants. In some cases, agents have said this information can easily be misinterpreted and penalizes sellers by making the house seem like there's something wrong with it. Other brokers, such as ZipRealty, display the information on every listing they have data for. (See reader's reactions to the topic of re-listing.)

What do readers think? Is this a move that aims to mask market conditions in which homes may be extremely difficult to sell? Or is this change simply adjusting the off-market period to a more reasonable time frame?

Remember that we're in an era of increased demand for transparency, and while moves like this may not intend to deceive, they could be interpreted that way.

UPDATE: A local Washington, D.C. area Realtor, Heather Elias, has shared more details about the MRIS change in the comments section below.

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