Zillow and Trulia are two popular “real estate” websites geared towards helping people search for homes in their local area and even estimating home values in their neighborhood. Inaccurate information in Zillow and Trulia are causing a lot of problems for home shoppers.
Let me explain.
These sites are not part of the Realtors Multiple Listing Service (MLS) nor are they an MLS of any kind. Zillow and Trulia are ‘aggregators’ or in other words, they are getting the listing information from other websites or in a small percentage of cases the information is inputed directly into Trulia or Zillow by the home owner or real estate agent.
No problem so far. Generally accurate information going in on day 1.
Here’s where we run into the problems though.
Once that property listing changes, goes off the market (sold, cancelled..etc) the status is not automatically updated. They aren’t connected to the MLS so often times the data is not accurate. In many cases a home that is not available still shows that it’s for sale until it eventually dies of old age on the site. This creates a problem in that consumers looking for accurate information look to Zillow and Trulia as “Authority” sites and they really aren’t. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve been called about a property and we look and look and can’t find it only to find out it was something a client saw on Zillow or Trulia and has been off the market for ages. They find it frustrating and so do we.
Alternative #1) What should you do to find accurate information on the real estate market? If you are searching for real estate in Sedona, use our website. The entire Sedona – Verde Valley Realtor MLS is on our www.sedonahomesonline.com website and the listings are synchronized with the MLS every night. You can also sign up for a free account and save searches and sign up for email notifications when a new home matches your Sedona home search criteria.
Alternative #2) We can set up a search in the Sedona MLS with your specific criteria. This comes with a portal that you can log into and view up to the minute, accurate information on listings that meet your needs.
If you’d like us to set you up with a Sedona MLS portal or search, just give us a call. If you would just like to browse the online Sedona real estate listings you can visit our Sedona homes search page.
Contact Susan & Troy (928) 451-6098
Hi! Sara from Zillow here.
“I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve been called about a property and we look and look and can’t find it” – Well, at least we are making your phone ring!
In all seriousness though, this is definitely something we are trying to address. You are correct that we indeed take data feeds from a number of sources: some from agents, some from brokers, some from MLSs and some from listing syndication services (aka Postlets, vFlyer). We process updates from these companies at least once a day. Agents do their clients a big favor by using these services because it blankets their home on the web, giving them a lot of exposure. However, very often the home doesn’t get taken out of these systems in a timely manner so they remain as ‘active’ in the feeds we are sent.
One change we recently made to our feed system is that we pinpointed the worst offenders of ‘non-updated’ data and we now will automatically expire the listings from these feeds from site after 90 or 180 days that the listing goes without any changes, depending on the feed. We did not apply this rule to any agent, broker or mls feeds because they are usually very current. We are actively working on many more ideas like this to try to do a better job discovering when we are still being sent incorrect data. This one change I described has already made a big difference.
And as agents learn more about syndication, they are also doing a better job maintaining their inventory. On the bottom of every home marked as being for sale on Zillow, we always cite the source of the data. So if the agent sees something incorrect, they know the which source they can go to and correct it.
As a media company we are honored to partner with the real estate community and be able to offer free exposure for your listings. However, at the end of the day, when people really become serious about buying and selling, it is highly advised to work directly with a real estate agent. So I am glad to hear people are calling you to get the most accurate information and so that they can hear your local perspective – something a computer can’t offer.
Thanks for the input.
Listings are syndicated to SO many places (100’s) now it’s impossible for agents to manually update them and they are often duplicated on sites. Syndication sites that rely on a human to manually update the listing cannot be accurate. We do tell the clients to not bother with Zillow, Trulia and the like because of these problems and to instead search from our website.
The only way to get accurate data on what is actually on the market is to go to an agents website with a IDX/RETS data feed directly from the MLS or have them create a MLS search portal for the client. Thats the closest you can get to real time data. Even Realtor.com isn’t in all the markets but every MLS is required to offer IDX/RETS MLS feeds to the MLS members (usually for $$) that they can provide on their websites.
Hi,
Zillow and Trulia are real estate websites with inaccurate information in the Sedona AZ MLS Sedona homes area.
Thanks,
Perk
Outstanding and Correct Analyis of Zillow and Truilla. Especially Zillow value comparsions, they do not take into considerations critical factors in evualating comparable properties. Good job Ms. Deierling.