From the Tag: trulia

Real Truth About Online Real Estate Listings

We’ve all seen the Zillow & Realtor.com commercials with the couple home searching on their tablet or pc looking at maps and school data all to make you feel warm and fuzzy. However, how accurate is that laptop-house-for-sale-sign-300x287data and how truthful are they being? I hate to be the barer of bad news, but it’s all just smoke and mirrors. Really, trust me. I know because I am not only a full time real estate broker, but also a full time web marketing and development consultant. I did an article last year about how truly inaccurate Zillow really is and most aggregators of RETs IDX data more times than not are inaccurate at best.

Recently, I have gotten even more annoyed with their more current campaigns claiming to have the “most up to date” listings. Their commercials are always bragging about how their listings are pulled
directly from the MLS every 15 mins some every 30 mins, so it’s the “most accurate” and “up to date” listings. All the while trying to convince the consumer user to use their sites vs others boombecause others just aren’t as accurate and somehow have stale listings. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and is borderline false. Let me explain.

 

This website you’re looking at for example is literally as if you’re looking at my local MLS board’s property listings and just as if I were to log into my MLS platform from the real estate board. As you look through homes in my website here, search around with queries, you are looking at the most current properties on my local Charleston South Carolina MLS. Those properties are coming into my websites via an IDX (Internet Data eXchange) feed directly from our MLS here in Charleston SC (CTAR) realtor board and our board only refreshes their server’s data twice a day, or once every 12 hours. Although Trulia, Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com and even other agent websites with vendor provided services tout 15 or 30 minute refreshes, it’s really just hogwash. Their servers might really refresh their database that often, but unless the board is also doing that (which they aren’t), then everyone, every realtor, every real estate agent with property listings, every real estate website has the same exact information (assuming their servers are grabbing at least twice a day as well).

 

I talked to the CEO of one of the nation’s best RETS IDX WordPress Plugin vendors: “typically we only set that rate for boards with lot of users because of the additional load it puts on server, the thing is, most of our [MLS] boards update twice a day because that is all the board itself updates and some boards restrict when we can pull data to early morning hours anyway. So basically they [Zillow, Realtor, Redfin other Vendor services for Realtors] have a loop that pulls the data and it takes about 30 minutes to run through that loop however, that data may not be updated but twice a day. It’s been my experience that most MLS boards around the country work in the same way. Primarily it’s a technology limitation thing. No matter what they want you to believe”.  For them to make that claim that they (unlike others) have the most fresh listings simply is false. It’s as fresh as anyone else’s.

 

The MLS board has the power over Zillow as pointed out by Inman.com. Furthermore, it’s my contention and most Realtors in the know, argue that going through your local agent will ALWAYS be the best place for anything pertaining to real estate vs a tech company that is simply their trying to grab the users contact information and sell it to real estate agents. Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com are not real estate companies at all, they are just web technology businesses.

 

In short, Do your local agents a favor and stop using them. 

Inaccurate Information Zillow Trulia

Take Zillow & Trulia With a Grain of Salt

 

I have a current client that I am currently negotiating a deal with and the contacted me all up in arms about the property with the belief that the house wasn’t coming with the standard kitchen appliances, or HVAC in the sale. So I asked them where did you get that information from?

 

Almost knowing what they were going to say without having to ask, their answer Trulia. As if Trulia and Zillow are the “Gods” of All knowing real estate?! People, those two companies are NOT real estate companies, they are ONLY tech companies with web developers writing code that pumps out information they can scrap and dig up from other sources, and HOPE that it is accurate in which most of the time it is not. Furthermore, since they themselves are just scraping, and pulling in data from other 3rd party sources who’s to say that the source of their data is even accurate. I wrote an article about this very topic “Realtor Will Always Be Best Place For Information“, because of this exact problem. In the case of my clients they were looking at what was the OLD original listing from 2010, and here we are in June of 2015. So because of Trulia I had to calm down my buyers and let them know that the house we were working on getting them did indeed come with the normal conveyed personal property for most transactions in our area of Charleston SC.

 

Zillow is the most popular online real estate information site, with 73 million unique visitors in December. Along with active listings of properties for sale, it also provides information on houses that are not on the market. These two sites are called aggregators, meaning they compile as much data from wherever they can get it, then archive (save it) so who knows what you’re going to get.

 

Most prospective sellers are familiar with Zillow’s “Zestimate”, and use it often where they will quote that number to their agent as a gauge of market value. The LA TIMES questioned the chief executive at Zillow: If a house for sale has a Zestimate of $350,000, a buyer might challenge the sellers’ list price of $425,000. Or a seller might demand to know from potential listing brokers why they say a property should sell for just $595,000 when Zillow has it at $685,000? This is a nightmare of the industry.

 

When CBS questioned Zillow’s exec about this problem here is what he said; “Back to the question posed by O’Donnell: Are Zestimates accurate? And if they’re off the mark, how far off? Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff answered that they’re “a good starting point” but that nationwide Zestimates have a “median error rate” of about 8%.

 

Eight percent!! In real estate that’s a huge difference! On a $500,000 house, that would be a $40,000 disparity. That’s just the median error rate, many times it’s off be much larger; and so much so that at the bottom of Zillow’s home page in small type is the word “Zestimates.” This section provides helpful background information along with valuation error rates by state and county. In the LA TIMES article: For example, in New York County — Manhattan — the median valuation error rate is 19.9%. In Brooklyn, it’s 12.9%. In Somerset County, Md., the rate is an astounding 42%. In some rural counties in California, error rates range as high as 26%. In San Francisco it’s 11.6%. With a median home value of $1,000,800 in San Francisco, according to Zillow estimates as of December, a median error rate at this level translates into a price disparity of $116,093.

 

One agent went to their own efforts to do research on this pervasive problem, and found on 17 sales Zillow overestimated values, including two houses that sold for 61% below the Zestimate.  In 25% of the sales, Zestimates were higher than the contract price. In 95% of the cases, he said, “Zestimates were wrong. That does not inspire a lot of confidence, at least not for me.” In a second ZIP Code, Dowler found that 100% of Zestimates were inaccurate and that disparities were as large as $190,000.

 

In summary.. Take the value you get from Zillow’s estimate exactly like their CEO states: a starting point only, do not take it as bond. Only your local agent will have the most accurate data.

 

 

A Realtor Will ALWAYS Be Best Place For Most Accurate Information

I write this with a little trepidation because I must admit as an agent I have used in the past, some of the tools that Zillow created, such as their older widgets and APIs. However, I think it’s time the public understands what exactly the major real estate listing aggregators (being: Zillow & Realtor.com) a.k.a. syndicators are really up to and why you as a user should take what they have to say with a grain of salt.

 

I am a licensed real estate broker in Charleston South Carolina (since 2005), and I once founded and owned a flourishing mortgage company for 9+ years to which I knew hundreds of real estate agents. So it’s not like I don’t know what I am talking about when I say real estate agents (most specifically Realtors) will ALWAYS be your BEST and MOST accurate place for reliable factual data about sales, listings, and the like. Assuming they are good, intelligent ones.

 

Let me explain. Zillow, Trulia, Movoto, & Realtor.com are not a real estate companies, nor are they in the business of selling real estate so what sense does it make to take their information as fact? They are tech companies, that make their profits by selling agents ad space and leads they derive directly from the listings we as agents put on MLS.

 

What’s so bad about this is that they take advantage of the fact that most agents don’t have the deep pockets they do to compete with them in the online real estate search market. That’s not the worst part, as many have found out the information they distribute to the public a lot of the time is incorrect, and inaccurate at best.  Zillow is notorious for publishing outdated properties that are no longer on the market. I have had prospective clients call me and ask about a property only for me to tell them that home isn’t for sale. They say to me, “but, I saw it on Zillow”.  I regularly receive inquires from prospective buyers who’ve seen this or that property for sale on Zillow or Trulia. When I look it up I find that the property is in escrow (under contract), or was recently sold, or was sold literally years earlier. 

 

Not to mention that the sales data, sales trends, and graphs they show are on average 20% off from the actual market which ONLY agents have access to. Sure they are pulling in sold homes data, and listings data then using some algorithm to regurgitate it back out in the form of a graph or stats, but there are other market factors that they can’t take into account because they don’t have actual MLS and local market intel your agent would be analyzing. The MLS listings published by the syndicators are mixed in with inaccurate and unreliable data that the syndicators gather from other sources. As a result, the reputations of Realtors and the Realtor Multiple Listing Services are compromised. What’s the MLS? Essentially it is just a communications portal for agents and brokers to share listings, details, and data about properties owners have employed the help of agents to market and sell.

 

In closing, ONLY your local agent can provide you with the MOST reliable and accurate understanding of the market and how to negotiate your home’s sale price, and or your offer price. If you’re going to use aggregator websites like Zillow, Trulia, or Realtor.com, use them as a nice, pretty way of looking at homes only… THEN call an agent (Realtor) for the facts.