Deepening Deluge of Real Estate Resources
We still recommend going with a real estate professional when it comes time to buy or sell a home, but if you're just probing the market or curious about the value of your home or others in your neighborhood, you've got an increasing number of online resources at your disposal. Just bear in mind that none of these have the complete information available from your local Multiple Listing Service, which your real estate professional can tap into for you.
For comparison, we checked listings in the popular West Olympia zip code of 98502. The local MLS shows 432 current home listings.
Roost (www.roost.com) show 376 listings in the same area; Trulia (www.trulia.com) lists 322 homes; Zillow (www.zillow.com) lists 434 homes -- which sounds impressive until you realize that their search criteria somehow included homes as far away as Shelton, WA; and Redfin (www.redfin.com) reports more than 500 results in a search for homes in the 98502 zip code. We're still puzzling over that number.
Obviously, you need to take these numbers with a grain of salt. As you do with home value estimates from Zillow or Eppraisal (www.eppraisal.com), which can vary by many thousands of dollars. So we'll stick with our advice to use these resources for rough research, then contact a real estate professional when it's time to proceed with a purchase or sale.
Labels: home values, olympia real estate, online resources, real estate
posted by Pru-Oly at 2:48 PM
1 Comments:
Thanks for the post. The difference between the MLS number and the Roost number is "pending" or "under contract" listings. There are 56 listings under contract for 98502. We have chosen to only show active homes for sale on www.roost.com. IDX sites like Roost give consumers a near perfect representation of what is in the MLS – as evidenced by your analysis. Roost is a mirror of the active homes for sale in the MLS.
This is an important issue. There is a "deluge" of real estate sites on the web today and we're trying to help consumers realize that there is a difference in the homes for sale content on these sites. Consumers searching for homes for sale don’t understand that many of the real estate sites online today offer just a fraction of the homes for sale in any given market. Additionally, many – as many as half of the listings on popular real estate search engines are inaccurate or no longer for sale. It’s not just about how big the number is – it’s about how accurate the content is. We can’t continue to ask consumers to sift through bad data.
www.Roost.com just released a independent study conducted by the WAV Group with an analysis of the homes for sale content on popular real estate sites like Trulia, Zillow, Google, & Yahoo. It can be found on our blog: http://blog.roost.com/2008/08/26/accuracy-online-property-searches-examination/
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