How to find the date an Add was placed online?

[shay1975]

Good suggestion dvw...

Although in IE the created and modified date seems to be set to the current day...

But if you look at the url of the image as below, this 2008519 must the folder on the server the image will be saved to and they seem to be ordering them by day, so 19th May, 2008. This URL is for a new add placed on domain which came into my inbox today and must have been uploaded yesterday.

http://images.domain.com.au/img/2008519/4440/2007168366_1_PL.JPG?mod=080519-232059

 

[mow]

date of original listing on RE.COM

Agents know that prospective purchasers subscibe to email alerts on re.com and they also know that prospective purchasers are often looking for "old" listings and hopefully desperate vendors.
Having recently sold a property I can confirm that a number of re agents "remove" a property from re.com and then "relist" it making it appear as a "new" listing. This also has the effect of generating a new email to prospective purchasers thus keeping the listing "fresh" as the agent put it.
Also many vendors list with an agent for a period of about 90 days (obviously some longer and some shorter), if the property fails to sell the vendor may terminate the agreement with one agent and list with another. This then appears as a "new" listing - I have been watching one overpriced property for some 6 months and it has turned up on re.com with another agent as a new listing. The vendor has even increased the sale price by 10k - how about that for a novel idea
Cheers

 

[dwv]

No, check the old ads and you will see they'll have earlier dates. The upload date and the actual post date may differ a day or two... but you generally have an idea when it was first posted.

Good suggestion dvw...

Although in IE the created and modified date seems to be set to the current day...

But if you look at the url of the image as below, this 2008519 must the folder on the server the image will be saved to and they seem to be ordering them by day, so 19th May, 2008. This URL is for a new add placed on domain which came into my inbox today and must have been uploaded yesterday.

http://images.domain.com.au/img/2008519/4440/2007168366_1_PL.JPG?mod=080519-232059

 

[dwv]

Apologies... shay1975 was right! I think a different date was showing up because that was when I first looked at the ad and the picture was saved in the temp folder... anyway, shay's way may be the easiest...

 

[AlmostBob]

the image for me has already a url including 20080520 (time difference)
the url to the image does not exist,
the image is served from a database structure and then made human friendly, usually none of the folders referenced exist
it carries the current days date which is the default setting for mod_rewrite
later parts of the url suggest the ad was posted as of 2007

adid=2007162722

722 ad of
162 day of
2007
or whatever structure the designer desired

 

[mow]

Hi
I noticed the url that Shay displayed was on domain.com . Had a look at a few examples that I am sure about the dates. Can't seem to make sense of the dates in the URL - ie I know one property that was listed in 2008 - but url gives a 2007 date ??? very confusing
Also re.com URL does not seem to display any date?
Can anyone confirm?

 

[FelixL]

If its a properly designed system, the ids are generated sequence numbers that have no meaning at all.

Any external facing system should never expose internal information, thats one of the first lesson I learnt in database design

 

[shay1975]

Without getting into a technical database discussion, as felix says the adid is auto generated (we assume) and incremented for every ad that is added. So what i was saying was you could try and work out from the adid how long ago an ad was posted, but you need to make an assumption on the number of ads created per day and then subtract that from the adid for the ad you are interested in...best of luck with that, but just a suggestion if you are desperate.

But you might have more luck with the url of the image and it seems like each image that is uploaded is stored in a folder on the server which is named at the date of upload i.e. 20080519...right click the image, select properties and look at the url of the image and this tells you the location of the image on the server...

But like another poster commented, adds are likely to be relisted for several reasons and you are unlikely to know the true original date of posting, only the last date of "relisting" the add.

The only true way to find out the date of original posting is to become best friends with the database administrator for domain or re.com and bribe him/her for the data

 

[Kenster]

www.oldlistings.com.au does not show start date of an ad, but it does show the timeframe when an ad first appears across a number of web sites.