Best Real Estate Mistake of the Year: The White House is For Sale

• December 16th 2010

by UrbanTurf Staff

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Back in June, UrbanTurf staff were engaging in that coolest of weekend activities (combing real estate websites for sweet listings) when we came upon an address listed for sale on Redfin that seemed out of place: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

As the gears turned for a way to turn this obvious mistake into a page-view jackpot, we sent an email to the powers-that-be at Redfin who quickly removed the White House from the site before any offers could be made (but not before websites like Gawker picked up the news).

So how did the most famous residential property in the land end up on Redfin in the first place?

Redfin took to its blog to explain the error. They wrote that “in addition to showing homes for sale from MRIS, the DC area’s multiple listing service, [the site] will also get homes for sale from [sites like] Zillow, ForSaleByOwner.com and Oodle.” One of the sites that Oodle gets its listings from, Owners.com, had listed the White House as an example property and the software for Redfin did not discriminate.

Two interesting things about the White House listing: 1) It was listed For Sale By Owner (insert joke here) and 2) the listing price for Obama’s abode was a measly $10 million. In the past year, the 132-room landmark has been valued for somewhere in the realm of $300 million. How’s that for a Deal of the Week?

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/best_real_estate_mistake_the_white_house_is_for_sale/2770.