Search for your New Home

Now more than ever with the influx of agents and inventory, Zillow / Trulia are not the portals to find the most current listings with accurate real estate data. As real estate agents know, our livelihoods depend on the accuracy of the data we analyze for our clients, and for that reason, I’m begging you to please stop searching for real estate on nationwide portals like Trulia and Zillow! Here are some reasons why buyers, in particular, should stay away from these websites.

SLOW REAL ESTATE SEARCH RESULTS

National portals like Trulia and Zillow are slow to show new listings and when they do show listings, the listing info from actual square footage to amenities included is inaccurate. When a property is listed for sale it hits the local MLS in a matter of minutes but can take as long as 9 days to populate to nationally syndicated sites according to studies on the subject. To Buyers ready to pounce 9 days might as well be 3 months. By the time a buyer sees the listing, sees the property, and submits an offer sufficient time will have passed that there could be one or more competitive bids, or quite possibly the property could have sold already. As a seasoned real estate agent, I know how important timing is. Getting a buyer into a listing even 24 hours later than your competitors can cause you to miss out on great deals.

BAD DATA

The real estate company Redfin was hired recently to assess the accuracy of sites like Trulia and Zillow and their study found that approximately 36% of the listings shown as active on Zillow and Trulia were no longer for sale in the local MLS, compared with almost 0% on local brokerage websites. The study further found that brokerage-sourced listings using their local MLS feed displayed 100% of the MLS homes listed for sale on their websites but Trulia only displayed 81% and Zillow 79%. So let me summarize – over 1/3rd of the listings you are seeing are not actually for sale and you only get to see 4/5th of the listings that are actually for sale. Obviously, anyone searching for properties in a city would like to have access to all of the listings that are for sale and none of the ones that aren’t.

MISLEADING ADVERTISING

Another common complaint from users of websites like Trulia and Zillow is the misleading nature of their advertising of listings. Real estate agents are allowed to purchase advertisements that appear prominently next to listings that are not theirs to mislead the buyer into contacting the advertising agent while the buyer mistakenly believes they are contacting the listing agent. Some buyers would prefer to receive property information from the listing agent because they feel he or she is more knowledgeable about the property.

WHAT’S MY HOUSE WORTH? (DON’T ASK ZILLOW)