In “Online Sleuthing For Home Buyers” Wall Street Journal reporter Shelly Banjo was just a little off the mark when discussing searching major real estate portals for homes for sale.
I know, hard to believe isn’t it?
Banjo writes (in reference to Zillow.com and Trulia.com):
For starters, users can enter a city, town or ZIP Code and see a listing of every home for sale, sortable by price, address, number of bedrooms or bathrooms, broker or type of home (single-family or multi-family).
My emphasis on every home for sale.
Really? A real estate shopper can go to Trulia or Zillow and “see a listing of every home for sale”?
Let’s take a little comparison peek at the homes available for sale in parts of the Phoenix real estate market.
What this table is showing you is the number of homes showing as currently for sale in various cities on Zillow, Trulia, and any local real estate agent’s MLS / IDX search.Zillow clearly misses the mark, providing only 13 - 29% of the available listings.
Trulia fares much better, providing 69 - 90% of available listings.
The local agent search provides 100% of the listings. (Well, not 100% as there could be some crazy broker out there who opts out of IDX — meaning they specifically request their listing not be included. This is a small fraction of listings, and wouldn’t be available on any search system)
Some might look at those Trulia numbers and think, “69 to 90 percent, that’s not so bad”.
True, as long as the home you want isn’t in that 10 - 31% of homes you’ll never see.
Here’s another little nugget from Ms. Banjo’s article:
Another interesting feature of Zillow.com is that people whose homes aren’t on the market but who would consider selling at the right price can post a “Make Me Move” price to see if there’s any interest worth exploring.
Interesting, maybe. Useful? I don’t know. My own home with its (slightly high) Zestimate of $340K has a “Make Me Move” price of $750K.
And yes, buy my home for $750K and you’ll make me move. Tomorrow. Heck, I’ll even help you move in.
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Technorati Tags: Zillow, Trulia, Wall St. Journal, on-line listings, “reporters”
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Jay,
I’m swiping this to run with, too. I have to run a few reports, but I won’t be surprised to see a similar result. Of course, I think it will tick someone off…
That makes me happy.
I wonder if real estate agents are paying for classified in the same section?
Our local newspaper in Minneapolis gets everything wrong, too. I am wondering if the newspaper in Phoenix is having a direct impact on your market? I am wondering if you are experiencing what we are experiencing here in Minneapolis. Here’s a post about what is going on up here:
http://www.realestatetwincitie.....y-falling/
Here in Santa Clara County, Zillow has dozens of inaccurate “Reported for Sale” listings and they also have “For Sale By Agent” listings assigned to the wrong agents. It’s a nightmare! After looking at your data, I can see why Zillow is desperate for more listings, even if they are wrong. One local agent has been waiting three weeks for Zillow to remove garbage data from their site.
Inaccurate online material is a way of the world. It’s an easy way to provide “far-fetched” information to lure in buyers.
It’s very frustrating for buyers.
This post is further proof that consumers ought to be reading real estate blogs and not exclusively mainstream media, whose knowledge may be confined to published press releases.
(Unless of course you are a blogger for the OC Register
http://tinyurl.com/ywv4k4 )
When such an esteemed publication as the WSJ can’t get it right, what chance do consumers.