I haven't noticed that - in other words, in my experience that is not what happens.
I have a looting script that is called by a player addaction. All it does is check the distance between the player and the nearest bilding. If this is less than 4 metres then the script assumes that he is in the building and checks for the looted objects (food and water in the case of my script, but I've made variants for guns, ammo, vehicles and even extra group members !).
One bit of the script records the last 50 buildings checked so that a player can't just stand in place looting the same building over and over again (unless he has lots of patience and lots of time !).
The script is dynamic, in other words in my experience it does update nearest building as the player moves. If your script is called just once at the start or collects player position just once then this may be your problem. Otherwise, I would suspect alien intervention.
cheers !
roni