Stale Listings On Zillow - Would Love Your Input Please

Agents using third-party syndication services do have a tendency to "set and forget".   We allow a manually-input listing to run 30 days. It's then automatically retired into a sandbox (isn't distributed) and the agent is notified they must sign in and renew for the next 30 day period. If they don't renew during the next 30 days, the listing is permanently expired from our database.

On search engines which allow us to provide expiration dates, we tend to set them short so if a listing gets sandboxed, it isn't likely to persist on those search engines for long (assuming the search engine actually expires when we request it) -- probably for no more than a week at a time, advanced daily when we are re-polled.

What largely determines whether dead listings continue to be distributed is whether or not expiration is dependent on the agents to remove them. Good luck with that! ;)

Judging a listing "stale" after 180 days because it hasn't "changed" is simply arbitrary and bears no relationship to reality -- particularly in this market.  How many homes are selling today in 180 days or less, unless at a deep discount?  Do all agents with active listings actually go in and make changes on all their listing content at least every 180 days?

As to rating independent feed providers, please resist the temptation to go the google-geek route by trying to invent a fancy math "algo" to answer that question. It isn't that complicated, since local expiration policy and methods mainly determine whether dead listings will continue to be published by a feed provider.  If the policy is porked, so will be the result

The listing agent is the sole authority for content and listing status, and a listing should never continue in distribution unless the listing agent actively confirms it remains "active".  If they have a habit of overtly fibbing, you likewise have a business decision whether to continue allowing them to "claim" their listings if those claims too-often prove to be bogus.

But instead of belaboring your long-suffering engineers with the intellectually interesting but completely loss-making task of coming up with some kind of "measure" showing which providers are most reliable, why not just send each of them a questionnaire to inform you how they manage expiration? 

There are four possible responses to your inquiry:

1. They don't respond at all to your email after two attempts.  Solution: quit polling them.

2. They respond that they entirely rely on the agent to disable the listing to expire it.  Solution: same as above (but offer counseling).

3. They respond that they expire after such an extended time period that it's almost certain they'll be sending dead listings. Solution: advise them to shorten it. If they don't, then revert to the solution cited above.

4. They respond that they expire listings after a sufficiently short time period (we recommend very short) to assure zombie listings are a virtual impossibility. Solution: none required.

'Not a complete answer to all problems, perhaps.  But it is one of life's most valuable lessons that people do what you inspect, not what you expect.  If local policy isn't enforced by the feed provider to produce the outcome you want, you are perfectly entitled to require that local policy be amended so you get more of what you want and less of what you don't want.

Yes, getting those email responses from 500 providers would probably take some clerical time to sort through and triage.  In my experience, clerical hours are in abundant supply and cost far less than engineering hours which are not.

I expect you won't receive 500 responses.  After further sorting the wheat from the chaff, you'll likely have far fewer than 500 approved feed providers.  Cull the herd.  Hard.  Those of us who focus on doing it right aren't rewarded if doing it utterly wrong is equally acceptable.

Someone here or elsewhere suggested Zillow add an expiration tag.  Yes.  If a feed provider is being polled daily, Zillow should also shorten that expiration to a week.  Getting dead listings off the inventory requires short interval scheduling to make that happen as fast as possible.

There are a number of entirely valid reasons agents choose to use third-party syndication services.  Unfortunately, some agents also tend to believe the more places they post, the better their syndication results. There is considerable evidence weighing against that belief, but that's far off the topic of the OP.

Thanks, Sara, for bravely wading into deep water.  You (and Zillow) are to be supremely complimented for asking how to make things better.

Hi Sara,

As a Real Estate Marketing Company, we syndicate listings and virtual tours. I believe that we supply one of the cleanest feeds out there because the integrity of our feed is important to our company, but more importantly to our clients, ensuring that the most up to date accuarate data is available to all of the sources we reach.

Although we are a small company, we are growing, and hope to provide our service to more folks. Hopefully Zillow and others would look to a smaller company like ours for the quality of our feed vs. the larger volume feed providers first. You may find that the chance of errors is smaller and the "stale data" dilemma is limited.

In order to keep our feeds clean and up to date, we make sure to actively communicate and involve our agents...something that a lot of the larger syndicates fail to do

It is my opinion that some of these larger volume feeds are just in it for the volume, rather than doing what is in the best interest of the clients they serve. I find that the statistical data is a bit fuzzy or just plain inaccurate and misleading.

It's interesting that Point2 and ListHub override some of the smaller feeds, just because they do get some broker/mls clients. Much of the Point2 listing data comes from their free agent service, which doesn't do much for solving the "stale listing" problem, especially if you are treating them as if it comes from the MLS. I think that alone may be harming Zillow.

Agents are busy. They also have been told, that the more places they put their listings, the more places it will be delivered. Unfortunately, all that does is muddy the syndication waters further, and leaves more places to clean up or follow-up. Agents may even find it hard to remember where they 'posted' their listings, thus making it hard to update a sold property.

Communication directly from the syndicate to the agent is key.  It shouldn't be Zillows job to contact all the listing agents and remind them to update their listings. It should be the responsibility of the companies that feed the listings to Zillow, to keep in touch with their agents/clients, and manage the integrity of their own feeds.

It is Zillows responsibility to make sure they are accepting feeds from syndicates that make it a key business practice to communicate directly with their clients and take ownership of providing a clean and accurate feed.

Okay,

So you want to solve the issue of stale listings?  The way you do this is to give us an option where we can detach the property from a feed and attach our own feed source.  We need to be able to control where the content to our listing is coming from.  This way we can do one of two things.

1) we can then manage our listing through the feed by updating our site, which in turn feeds zillow any changes.

2) we can then manage the property manually if no feed is selected.  However, with this option there will be a host of other options to help avoid stale listings...such as:

the option to select how often an agent should sign in to zillow in order to keep the manual listing overriding the feed (the amount of time should be determined by the agent but capped at a maximum of 180 days).

The option to select when to revert to the feed if certain criteria arent met...for example, if no changes to the listing have been made in the past six months (i.e. price drop or status changed to sold) and the listing agent hasn't signed in then it's time to reattach the feed and see if there has been a sale or a change in the listing, then update it at that point and keep it on the feed until the agent returns to manually override the feed.  Honestly, if no changes have been made in the past six months then the listing really should be pulled from the site because the seller/agent aren't making a realistic effort to sell the home by not dropping the price or adding photos or remodeling the home...whatever it takes to get it sold.

If an agent isn't keeping on top of their listing they probably aren't very good and will probably be fired by the owners at some point and another agent will take over the listing and they need the ability to change the feed source to their website so that they don't have to continually log into Zillow if they want to just control the listing via the feed and make all their changes at the feed origin (their listing website).

Why is this so hard?  Feel free to contact me if you have more issues, I'm sure there will be more questions, but it isn't that hard...you revert to the feed if the manual method is stale for a predetermined amount of time, and you rely on the agent to be professional enough to set a realistic timeframe for certain "trigger" events to take place such as reverting back to the feed.  In some cases you'll have an owner that will want to control the listing or want to make some changes...at this point they will need to make the changes...an e-mail is sent to their agent and they will okay them or deny them...it's not that hard...but at this point a dialogue is taking place between the agent and owner.  if the owner wants to drop the price they make the changes on the website just like the listing agent and if after 3 days if no response is had from the agent then the changes are applied...if the agent comes back to a messed up listing then they can "undo" the last change that was made by the owner or "revert back" to their original listing.   If an owner is unhappy with an agent there should be an icon "fire this agent" and then the agent should be removed from the website and the listing should then become the property of the owner and if they decide to no longer list it or mess the listing up that's their thing...they own the property, right? 

I guess this would put in place the checks and balances needed for the owners of properties not to feel like second rate citizens...I mean if I want my agent signing in every day otherwise the listing reverts back to the live feed, I deserve to have them deny my request and call me on the phone and tell me that isn't going to work for them for reasons x,y and z.

It's so simple, but there are just a lot of changes that need to take place.  The right balance of checks need to be made and they just arent there right now.

It seems right now an owner can't make any changes to a listing once an agent has claimed it regardless if they are the right agent or not.  Plus, what about owners that pay a fee to have their listing put on the MLS but don't have representation?  They should be able to "Fire this agent" and then take over the listing from there.  It makes it so that an owner is first in line and the agent is second in line...because if an owner has a falling out with an agent it can get ugly and the last thing you want is a zillow property battle between an owner and ex-listing agent.

Rob.