With the trulia and zillow merger (Zulia) the questions of how much longer can realtors survive is up for debate again. Wasn't zillow suppose to eliminate realtors and make the home shopping experience much easier ? Instead all it ended becoming was another way to get advertising costs out of realtors.
I think with the inaccuracy of the listings on these websites it has made the home buying experience much harder for buyers. Zillow and Trulia are full of fake self made listings by agents on wesbites like postlets. If I were do a search on my MLS and Truila or Zillow and compare the accuracy would be awful.
Here is an example I did a search on Zillow for (only) homes in Cooper City and active on the MLS, their was only 111 homes but on zillow there are 300+ homes for sale and thats 200 + listings in just one city (which by the way is one of the smaller cities in the broward area) that are not really for sale. (granted their may be some auction.com, hubuzu, and realty trac homes but is thier really 200+ of these ,when homes are selling in under 2 or 3 weeks in this area ? )
Here's my point, we are here to protect the consumer, could you imagine if you didn't need a license or just anyone could right a contract or start a real estate company. Look at what happened with the mortgage crisis when regulation was lacking, we are still paying for this today. Do you think the average consumer can handle a transaction from start to finish ? What about when people were selling the same lots of land 3, 4, and 5 times over again to different people (the internet would make this easier) ? Contracts and documents can easily be forged to look legitimate.
Zillow, trulia, or Zulia what ever you want to call is just another advertising platform for real estate, I think niche based location websites will soon come into play more then ever.
What do you think ?
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