"Three bedroom, one badroom."

– Local MLS listing

One misplaced letter in your entry in the local multiple listing service can be comical, as is the one above that Jane Peters of Power Brokers International in Pasadena, Calif., discovered. Or it can be fatal.

For example, if your house is listed on Polar Lane when it is actually on Poplar, your place may never be found, even if it is the cream puff everyone is looking for. The same holds true if the school district is incorrect, the ZIP code is wrong, the number of bedrooms is misstated, or the map coordinates are inaccurate.

"It's not always the price that prevents a sale," says Jim Crawford, an agent with RE/MAX Paramount Properties in Atlanta, who specialized in expired listings in the early 1990s. "Sometimes the listing is so totally flawed -- incorrect data, price, directions -- that no one can find it."

"Open Hose With Cheese and Wine"

Even worse, perhaps, is that buyers often rely on information contained in the listing, and if it's not correct -- perhaps the listing said 30 acres when it was actually 20, or that zoning allowed for an in-law suite when it really didn't -- they go to court.

As counsel to the Pennsylvania Association of Realtors and an attorney representing numerous brokers and agents, James Goldsmith has defended hundreds of lawsuits over inaccuracies in MLS descriptions. Plaintiffs usually don't prevail, Goldsmith says, but both sides spend a lot of time and money litigating who's right and who's wrong.

Some MLS errors are simple typos, such as "bring us your fuzziest buyers," when the agent surely meant "fussiest." But a simple transposed number, such as when an agent enters 2,300 square feet instead of 3,200, can be a huge mistake.

Or when the house is listed with four upstairs bedrooms and one bathroom instead of two. "Nobody in their right mind will show a house with just one bathroom feeding four bedrooms," says Crawford, the Atlanta agent.

Sometimes the gaffe may not be a mistake at all, but rather a purposeful entry by a less-than-honorable agent who is trying to drive traffic to the property. After all, once a would-be buyer shows up, the error can be corrected. No harm, no foul. Right?

That's why it's always a good idea for sellers to review their listings for errors and omissions before they are posted.

If you don't, your castle may not sell, no matter how grand, especially in this day when would-be buyers scour the Internet for properties before hopping in the car for a personal visit. Or you could find yourself as the defendant in an unwanted lawsuit.

"If a buyer gets his first tax bill and it is much higher than what was stated in the listing, the first thing he does is go to a lawyer," says Goldsmith, the Pennsylvania attorney.

"First Peeview Sunday"

It would be wrong to say listings are riddled with miscues. Indeed, many agents are surprised there are so few mistakes, especially considering the huge volume of data that makes its way into local listings every day.

But once an error is made, it is compounded almost instantly, because listings these days are propagated immediately to regional, national and even international aggregators such as Zillow, Realtor.com and dozens of others.

Almost any error can blow up a sale. If the address is incorrect, the house becomes nonexistent. It could be a wrong house number, wrong street, wrong ZIP code or wrong MLS area.

Sometimes the directions are incorrect. Even in this age of GPS, a prospect may not be able to find your place, especially if the map coordinates are wrong or missing, or if a particularly sloppy agent made other mistakes.

The list of possible errors is as detailed as the listing form itself. If the agent lists the wrong school district, or perhaps doesn't list the district at all, a buyer may pass on your place without giving it a second look. Or, worse, he might buy your house thinking it's in the better school system and sue you when he finds out it's not.

Maybe the house is so close to the county line that in an attempt to draw interest, the agent "inadvertently" puts down that it's in what's perceived as the better county. Again, a lawsuit in the making.

Then there are errors of fact. The wrong room dimensions, square footage, acreage and age of the house also can -- and do -- get people in hot water, especially if the buyer relies on the misinformation to be truthful.

"Call for Privates Showing"

On the buyer's side, there's simply no substitute for your own due diligence.

"The smart buyer checks everything that's important to him," advises Goldsmith. He points out that not only are transcription errors "not infrequent," but that information entered into the MLS often is taken directly from inaccurate public records.

He advises buyers who depend on MLS information to add a proviso to the sales contract stating that the decision to purchase the property is based on specific seller representations -- such as acreage or square footage -- which the seller represents and warrants to be accurate. And it wouldn't hurt to add a sentence that states: "This warranty to survive settlement."

Such a clause "shifts the risk of accuracy squarely on to the seller's shoulders," Goldsmith says.

Joy and Andrew Giordano thought they could save their Baltimore home from foreclosure without any help. But in the end, they couldn't.

To avoid foreclosure, the Giordanos applied twice to their lender for refinancing under the government's Making Home Affordable program. Twice, they were turned down.

"We were not getting the right information from our bank," says Joy, who had to close her advertising specialties business because of the economic downturn. "We did everything we were told to do. But each time, we were not approved because of this or not approved because of that."

A friend suggested they speak to a housing counselor, but they were hesitant. On top of being embarrassed over their plight, the Giordanos didn't like the idea of pouring out their hearts to a total stranger.

"We thought we were doing a pretty good job on our own ratcheting things back," Joy recalls. "But through no fault of our own, we were on the verge of losing our house."

They called the counselor their friend recommended. But even that didn't help. They talked to the counselor several times, but she was too "overwhelmed" trying to help so many people in the same situation to offer much guidance.

Finally, out of desperation, the Giordanos gave counseling one last shot. This time, it worked.

The second counselor was "absolutely wonderful," says Joy, whose husband, a retired police officer, lost his job as an older-adult fitness specialist when a grant ran out at the college where he was working.

"We were pulling out money from our pensions and investments to make our house payments, and we got to the point where we realized we could not only lose our house, we could lose everything. But (the second counselor) worked with us and helped us put the package together into a format the underwriters could understand. And we got approved," Joy says.

Study after study has found that the Giordanos are not alone. For any number of reasons, people are way too timid when it comes to housing counseling.

Some view their situations as hopeless, while others think they can resolve their problems without any outside help. Still others are reticent to divulge their financial messes, are worn down by unresponsive lenders or have been burned by unscrupulous businesses that charge high fees but deliver no service.

Some even believe they cannot afford to ask for

assistance.

But research shows that counseling works if you embrace it. According to one Department of Housing and Urban Development study, nearly seven out of 10 families were able to retain their homes with the help of a HUD-certified counselor. More than half cured their defaults and became current on their loans.

Want more proof? A Federal Reserve study found that counseled borrowers were more likely to obtain a loan modification and with better terms than uncounseled borrowers. And the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that counseled owners were more likely to remain current once a modification was won.

Still, seeking help from a government-approved counseling agency is a big step. So, to help you understand the process and ease your fears, here is what you can expect.

-- Beforehand: You can help the dialogue with the counselor by having the following information at your fingertips: your monthly income and expenses, a list of debts and assets, the name of your mortgage servicer, the date the loan was issued, your payment amount, the interest rate and balance due, and the day and name of your last contact with the servicer or the company collecting your payments.

-- Contact: The phone call will last about an hour and will begin with a privacy disclosure. Once you understand your rights, the counselor will collect the above information and take the time to answer any questions or concerns you have. You will be asked to discuss your "hardship," or the reason you are having difficulty making your payments.

-- Choices: Based on a review of the information you provide, the counselor will explain all the options available to you. These might include a loan modification, in which your lender agrees to any number of changes, including principal reduction. Or they might include ways to dispose of your property and ease you out of your tenuous situation.

The discussion also could cover nonprofit resources and services of which you may not have been aware.

-- Action plan: The counselor will work with you to create an action plan to be used in preparing a recommendation to your lender.

You can take it from here, or your counselor can call the lender on your behalf to go over his or her recommendation and determine whether the lender is willing to help. If the counselor calls, you can listen in on the line or not. It's your choice.

-- Pay dirt: If the lender agrees, or if you and the lender find another alternative to save your house, you, with the help of a counselor, have succeeded where you alone might otherwise have failed. If the lender cannot help for some reason, you will be told what to expect and perhaps offered post-foreclosure counseling or even a cash stipend to ease your transition out of the house and into another dwelling.

All this is free. No charge. Gratis. If you happen to reach someone who asks for money upfront, hang up and go elsewhere.

You can find a list of HUD-certified counselors at the HUD website (www.hud.gov) and at www.nfcc.org, the National Foundation for Credit Counseling.

Prices on a per-square-foot basis rose in 78 of the nation's 100 most-active housing markets, another signal that a recovery is afoot, according to the latest figures from the field.

For the most part, price-per-square-foot increases were in single digits. But several "core-based statistical areas," including formerly downtrodden places like Phoenix and Fort Myers, Fla., notched strong double-digit gains, according to data from Pro Teck Valuation Services of Waltham, Mass. (Uncle Sam defines a core-based statistical area, or CBSA, as a geographic "micropolitan" area of at least 10,000 people who are tied to the urban center by commuting.)

Price per square foot is the great equalizer when it comes to studying housing prices, because it adjusts for product mix. Median house prices are interesting, says Michael Sklarz of Collateral Analytics, which supplies Pro Teck's data. "But if you want to know how much houses are selling for, you need to know their price per square foot," he says.

That's why this column is switching horses, from quarterly reports on median prices supplied by the Federal Housing Finance Agency to Pro Teck's numbers. FHFA's data have been the basis for the Housing Scene's price columns since it began more than 30 years ago, long before Case-Shiller and other rip-and-reap reports became popular.

But the government's numbers are highly susceptible to the vagaries of the market. The FHFA has reported surges of 40 percent or more in median house prices for some metropolitan areas during reporting periods when many more higher-cost homes than usual changed hands. Likewise, sales of an unusually large number of lower-priced dwellings can distort the average on the downside.

Granted, Pro Teck's data also can show huge changes. But price per square foot "normalizes" for swings in product type and size, which presents a truer picture of the market.

Pro Teck's figures have another advantage in that they are more current than anything else available. Numbers from other indexes can be three to six months old. But Pro Teck says it catches sales data almost immediately from 850 multiple listing services nationwide. Once a deal closes, it is captured in Pro Teck's database, which is updated at least daily and culled 15 days after the end of each month.

Like the FHFA's figures -- the ones from its Mortgage Interest Rate survey of the nation's largest metro areas, not its monthly House Price Index, which is another lagging indicator -- Pro Teck's figures cover jumbo loans over the conforming loan limit. To do otherwise, as the oft-quoted House Price Index does, would be to underreport a big swath of sales, especially on the coasts.

Pro Teck's numbers also are more detailed than any others, drilling deep into ZIP codes and neighborhoods. National numbers make for great headlines, but they are absolutely worthless for buyers and sellers who need to know what's going on in their local markets.

Pro Teck's numbers are not without their drawbacks. For example, new-home sales, which tend to lead the market up and follow it down, are not fully captured. But in that savvy builders these days are listing their products on local multiple listing services -- 790 of the 9,292 current listings in the immediate Washington, D.C., area are for brand-new houses -- Pro Teck catches at least some builder sales.

Another shortcoming is that the Massachusetts company sells its data to investors, lenders and loan servicers. Government figures are preferable to those from a private company trying to make a profit from them.

That said, Pro Teck's statistics are as good as they come. Here's what the company's figures for the latest three months as of Aug. 1 tell us:

Phoenix and Fort Myers are rebounding very well, as are San Jose, Calif., and Detroit. The median price per square foot paid in the Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale CBSA rose by a whopping 31.2 percent from the same period a year ago, from $64.03 to $84.01. Interestingly, the median house price in the Phoenix CBSA was up 31.4 percent over the same period, from $118,000 to $155,000. In the Fort Myers-Cape Coral CBSA, the median square foot cost was up 19.4 percent, from $59.46 to $71.

In the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CBSA, the median square foot cost rose almost 19 percent, from $377.86 to $449.51. Nearly $450 a square foot is a lot to pay for a house, which is why the median house price in San Jose was $765,375 as of Aug. 1. But it's even more expensive in the neighboring CBSA of San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, where the median price per square foot is $476.95, up 5.9 percent from a year earlier.

The Detroit area also is showing signs of a strong recovery. The average cost per square foot in the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn CBSA rose 16.4 percent, from $41.54 to $48.34, while the price in Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills increased 10.3 percent, from $68.01 to $75.

Overall, square-foot prices were up by double digits in eight CBSAs. On the flip side, none of the 22 core areas that registered lower prices per square foot over the last three months saw more than an 8 percent decline. The largest slides were in Gary, Ind., down 7.8 percent, and Birmingham, Ala., at minus 6.4 percent.

For what it's worth -- and it isn't worth much -- the median price per square foot for the 100 most active markets combined was $89.75 as of Aug. 1, a 2.6 percent increase from $87.44 at the same time a year ago.