I picked this up on Jay Thompson’s blog a couple of days ago.
Shelly Banjo has an article posted on Wall Street Journal Online titled “Online Sleuthing for Home Buyers”. In the article, Banjo discusses the ever increasing amount of information available on various websites to Internet users searching for real estate. In particular, she talks about Zillow.com and Trulia.com, arguably the two hottest names in real estate portals on the web.
While both Trulia and Zillow are building their following by providing supplemental information related to real estate (which the public is demanding more and more), they are not there in regards to having a full listing of homes for sale in a particular area. Banjo writes regarding these two sites;
“For starters, users can enter a city, town or ZIP Code and see a listing of every home for sale, sortable by price, address, number of bedrooms or bathrooms, broker or type of home (single-family or multi-family).” (emphasis added)
That is just not the case Shelly. Let’s look at the numbers for this area by doing a search for homes in Dothan, AL at each of these sites.
[TABLE=22]
What’s the difference? Trulia relies on syndication agreements from various entities, including some franchises and larger brokerages, while Zillow mostly relies on user input for its listings. In other words, the listing agent has to post it on Zillow. As you can see by the number of Dothan homes for sale listed on Zillow, precious few Dothan real estate agents are going to take the time to do that.
A local site that has MLS access and allows searching of those MLS listings through IDX will ALWAYS have every listing and be the most accurate. I say always with one caveat. Sometimes brokers choose not to allow other brokerages to display their listings. Backwards thinking for sure, and thankfully there are currently no such restrictions in Dothan.
The bottom line is this. If you want to really search the market in your area, searching on a local REALTOR or brokerage site is your best option. Of course, we want you to search to your heart’s content on our site. We made it easy for you!
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