On-line Home Search – The Wall Street Journal Reports. Incorrectly.

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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[tags] Zillow, Trulia, Wall St. Journal, on-line listings, “reporters”[/tags]

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