There's a reason your agent recommends you look at certain websites for your home-shopping.
And it's not just because we want to make sure you stick with us!
A lot of websites pull straight from our MLS sytem - the database that maintains the status of all listed homes for our region. That's a good thing, as it means their data is as accurate as the MLS's. This is called IDX, which you might see mentioned somewhere on that website. These are the best kinds of sites to search for homes. There are still variables such as how often the IDX updates the site. Mine pulls live searches everytime, so is effectively 'real time', where some may update at midnight, or twice a day, etc. They're still better repositories because it is the most up to date info and will reflect if a home has sold or gone under contract as that home will simply not show up any longer.
Then there's the other ones. Some of these other sites are manual sites, requiring homes to be input manually, or pulling from other locations where homes are input manually or rarely updated. The problem with that is these sites are often very out of date and often do not have all the homes for sale. If you can imagine for a moment, we have about 100 homes go on the market on any given day. Do you think someone is sitting there at that website entering in every home every day? No way! It'd be cheaper to do an IDX than waste someone's time like that! Many magazine sites work this way, and I rarely find that they update the status of the home to indicate if it has sold. They just put up the homes as they get new magazine ads in. And not all agents use Magazines for their listings, so you'll miss most of the homes for sale using their sites.
Some of those sites pull their listings from syndications - the agent selling a home has put it on a website somewhere, that feeds information to other websites. The problem with these is that only the homes that are put on that original site that show up and not all agents put their homes in the same online locations, so you may not be seeing the full number of available homes. Another big downfall is the lack of updating. It will pick up a new addition, but hardly ever does it reflect if that home has gone under contract or sold. I've had buyers call me up with listings for homes that sold a year ago, that are still showing up on some of these sites.
Sometimes you think you're in a completely legit place and you STILL find a bad ad. Take this example:
My buyers found a home they wanted to schedule for a showing. I looked and it was nowhere on the MLS system in any variation of spelling. They told me they'd found it on Realtor.com (which SHOULD be a good source!). So I went there and found the ad. It was listed through a company out in California, with a California MLS id. The seller basically had paid a small fee ($295) and gotten their home put in the cheapest MLS they could find, in order to get a Realtor.com ad. Turns out when we finally got the seller to call back (a week later), the home had sold 2 months ago and he just hadn't told the California folks to pull the ad.
So you can get some problem ads on otherwise reputable sources with folks using questionable methods in order to avoid paying full fees.
So the point is:
If you stick with your agent's local IDX website (such as my website for finding Wichita, KS Homes for Sale!), you'll have much more up-to-date reliable searches and be less likely to be disappointed when that home you saw online really isn't for sale after all!
Ready to hunt through an accurate and updated website where the home for sale is really for sale? Visit us on the web with the button below!
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