Ad listing White House for sale not legit

alternate textThe false listing of the White House (click image for larger version)

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Despite what one real estate listing site suggested this weekend, the federal government has not resorted to a real estate fire sale to solve its budgetary woes. The site, Redfin, falsely reported in a listing page this weekend that the White House had hit the market for $10 million — a fantastic bargain for the 55,000-square-foot mansion, at $182 per square foot. While the listing page could have been a prank, it turned out that to be an honest mistake — the site’s automated system pulled the listing from a site called Owners.com, which had posted the “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” property as an example listing for users. Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, told The Real Deal that the listing was entirely inadvertent. “One of our data providers just got snookered,” Kelman said, noting that the error was due to an automated program, and not human error. Of course, it hasn’t all been bad news for Redfin — “since [the false page was up] traffic to the site has had a tremendous spike,” Kelman said. Even so, the company took the page down as soon as it realized its error, Kelman added. [NBC via Gawker]