Beware of the accuracy of real estate website portals!

By
Real Estate Agent with Progressive Realty (Boise Idaho) www.Progressive-Realty.info DB-17066

In researching my local market in Boise, Idaho; I was curious about the accuracy of various consumer website portals.  I decided to drill down to a small city in our area to make the data more manageable so I selected Kuna, Idaho.

For example, I pulled a small city near here called Kuna, Idaho.  Searching for Single family homes for sale I found the following:
  • Cyberhomes = 177
  • Homes.com = 142
  • MLS = 239
  • Realtor.com = 239
  • Trulia = 192 (after limiting to single family and not foreclosure listings)
  • Zillow = 171 (but I had to remove for sale by owner, foreclosure data and "make me move" type listings)
Then, I narrowed the search down to homes with:
  • 4+ bedrooms;
  • 2+ bathrooms;
  • 2000+ sq. ft.
And found the following mix of answers:
  • Cyberhomes = 22
  • Homes.com = 39
  • MLS = 50
  • Realtor.com = 50
  • Trulia = 80
  • Zillow = 33 (plus one "make me move listing")
Now, I will have to go through each of these and determine why they are so different.  I know Realtor.com pulls straight from the MLS so they are very current and they only show MLS properties but am very pleased to have found a 100% match there.

How do these numbers compare to your market?

 

Comments (3)

Jim Paulson
Progressive Realty (Boise Idaho) www.Progressive-Realty.info - Boise, ID
Owner,Broker

I will also pull up the same style home in each market to see if any of the sites provide AVM's so that I can show that variance.  In Idaho, we are a non disclosure state, so we don't post the solds from the MLS system, so these numbers will probably be all over the board!

Jul 18, 2010 07:52 AM
Marchel Peterson
Results Realty - Spring, TX
Spring TX Real Estate E-Pro

Jim, It is amazing that they have such big differences.  Where do they draw their data from?

Jul 18, 2010 04:42 PM
Jim Paulson
Progressive Realty (Boise Idaho) www.Progressive-Realty.info - Boise, ID
Owner,Broker

@Marchel, that is the problem with many portals is they pull from secondary data sources instead of from the source.  Many populate their database via listing feeds from larger real estate brokerages or from agents directly.  Some get it from programs like ListHub or Point2 or VisualTour, etc., that syndicate their subscribers listings to them.  Some do not have filters to remove duplicates if you have data supplied from multiple accounts.

I also just checked Google Base and when I populated the search criteria for Kuna 4 BR+, 2 Bath+, 2000+ sq. ft. homes it returned a list of 469 homes instead!

Jul 19, 2010 05:48 AM

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