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Buying and Selling Homes

The Truth? About Online RE sites..Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com

Suzi AKA DesertDance So CA Zone 9b

10 years ago

Is there a truth?

What I have found is that most of their listings are no longer active.

Why are they not pulled? Could it be that Realtors want you to call? AKA Advertising?

Can we trust them? Doubtful.

If you are selling or buying a home, your realtor should give you a link into the REAL MLS!

Look at zip code 92544 (mine) on all the above. You will find a lot of homes. Then look at the real MLS. THREE!! There are only 3 homes for sale here. If you do it, search for 1+ acre, 3+ bedrooms, 3+ baths.

Those online sites are not updated for many reasons, but mostly Realtors advertise on there, do not pull their ad, because they want you to call, and of course, they do have OTHER more interesting properties....

JMHO

Suzi

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Comments (4)

Linda
10 years ago
Actually you are mistaken. The MLS shows the listings have accepted offers, the online sites don't have the ability to do that on the same level. . The homes are not yet sold but rather going thru the process of being sold. They cannot be pulled as you say until they close. Realtors have no control over what zillow, trulia or any of the others report. So unfortunately for you, your statement is just a lot of hot air.

The mls is paid for by realtors, you must be licensed and a realtor ( not just an agent) to have MLS. An agent can lose their membership and license for giving that access out.
ncrealestateguy
10 years ago
Suzi, Suzi, Suzi,
You can trust me when I say that agents have absolutely no control over these third party sites. And whatever you are referring to as the MLS, is not.
These third party sites are nothing more than data aggregators. And the more data they have, the more clicks they get. The more clicks they get the more they can charge for their ad space. Simple as that. They do not care that the data is old or incorrect.
If you are a serious buyer or seller, your RE agent can set you up on a listing search that is up to date to the day.
Personally, I boycott all those third party sites, and always encourage my buyers and sellers to do the same. They take my and my sellers listings and then try to sell us agents leads that are generated by these listings... which is fine, but I choose not to promote them at all.
Now, I hope you feel better knowing that you just "spoke" with two highly trustful agents. There are still a few of us out here.
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While I use many of the online tools to make decisions, that does not mean I accept something just because someone says it is so. And that is not just information taken from the reviews. You may proclaim your reviews to be trustworthy, but in truth, I am the one that will be determining if I find them trustworthy. Your say-so counts for zilch at this point; trust is something you have to establish. And while "we are planning to be extremely strict about which reviews get posted to the site." is a sound byte that is intended to inspire confidence, it leaves me wondering whether your criteria for weeding would align with mine, or cause the results to skew the way you determined they should be over how I would rank priorities. When I am doing research on business and services, I read everything. Then I weed out what I think is bogus or not a priority, and evaluate what remains. So the stricter you are with removing what you determine to be unhelpful, the less helpful your site might actually become IMO. That said, being able to separate by filters could be very a useful tool. But I might use it differently than you seem to envision. For example, it sounded as if you think days on market information would provide me with the names of agents that sell homes quickly. Frankly, that information may just provide a list of agents that under-priced the homes for quicker sales, or didn't have clients that refused to lower their asking price. You may provide the info--but I am still going to interpret that information how I see fit. Granted, many site users will not look beyond the face value statistics. Cannot say I am sorry you have gone the non-star rating route. It is a pain weeding through one-star reviews that evaluate Windows 8 rather than the computer for a computer review, for example-- (fresh in my mind from my research yesterday lol). But I am curious what you may have set up in its stead. Good luck with your new site.
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You can check the county assessor's office for the county you're interesting in moving to. Some of them are online - my county in Tennessee is, my daughter's county in NC is and my son's county in Ohio is online. The information would probably vary by locale but in my instance I can get sales history and even name of present owner as well as taxes, size of house and lot etc. In my county I can even get a satellite view of the home. Check the county to see if a website is available for assessor's office.
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Thanks jojoco. I found another national site that I think I really like - Trulia. Not only can you search for active listings (and by lot size!), you can also find sold homes in that same area. It gives you all kinds of stats about the local market and such. I wonder, though, how accurate and up to date that info is. It says no homes have sold in my area in the last 60 days; however, I know of a couple of homes that have sold recently or are at least pending. Another site I found is homes dot com. It seems to be good and like realtor dot com sometimes gives addresses when local sites won't disclose the address - which I really appreciate. Has anyone used Trulia? What are your thoughts? Here is a link that might be useful: Trulia
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I understand your sentiment. I think the expectation of immediate and easy access to information is the new normal, today's reality. Lot's of available "information" is wrong, that's also the new normal. Think of how often you see people talking and someone pulls out a cell phone to check something or do a search about what was being discussed. I do that myself, probably because of my pedantic streak. It's all public information. This barn door can't be closed, whether there's still time or it's too late, because there isn't one.
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DLM2000-GW
10 years ago
Suzi seems to be getting some jollies trolling around the boards here with various topics that all have similar feel. She has URGENT news we ALL need to read. Or has had a HORRIBLE experience and wants to WARN us so we can PROTECT ourselves from a similar fate. sigh...... give it a rest, Suzi.
chispa
10 years ago
If your area has redfin.com, they are a great RE site. Listings are updated throughout the day, they show pending & back up offer status and you can search for solds too.

I used it when buying and now use it to keep up with my local market.

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