8 ms·

I know it's anecdotal, but most realtors I have met actively dislike Trulia/Zillow/etc

smacktoward 12y ago
That's right, because they generally have their own proprietary source of data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_listing_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_listing_service), which is a big part of the appeal of working with a realtor -- they learn of new listings faster than you can by relying on public, "open source" data. And realtors aren't stupid; they noticed what happened when other professions that were built on closed data opened their databases up to the public. Travel agents, for instance, used to be the only ones who could search the SABRE database (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_%28computer_system%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_%28computer_system%29), which made it valuable to work with an agent when making your travel plans. Then in the '80s the company behind SABRE started opening it up to the public, first via services like CompuServe and AOL, and then later via the Web. Suddenly travelers didn't need a travel agent anymore; they could get the same booking data right from their computer. And travel agencies as a business sector promptly collapsed (http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/03/travel/travel-agent-survival/ http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/03/travel/travel-agent-survival/). For this reason, the real estate agents have little desire to see MLS data show up in publicly-accessible services like Zillow. The current state of affairs appears to be that it does eventually flow out to them, but with a significant (1 week+) delay -- which lets the agents preserve their status as the people you have to talk to if you want the freshest data.
- Domenic_S 12y ago
  > The current state of affairs appears to be that it does eventually flow out to them, but with a significant (1 week+) delay I don't think that's true, at least not for Redfin. According to them: "Homes on the MLS show up on Redfin in 30 minutes or less." - http://forums.redfin.com/t5/Inland-Empire/How-quickly-does-MLS-info-get-posted-on-redfin/td-p/433041 http://forums.redfin.com/t5/Inland-Empire/How-quickly-does-M... "Local brokerage sites like Redfin show homes for sale immediately, as opposed to the seven to nine day delay typical for the national portals." - http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2013/03/you-deserve-to-see-it-all.html#.U5Yj9S-yPjU http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2013/03/you-deserve-to-see-it-al... "Updates every 15-30 minutes" - http://www.redfin.com/about/data-quality-on-redfin http://www.redfin.com/about/data-quality-on-redfin The biggest advantage of a local (real human) broker is they know what's about to go up for sale, have detailed neighborhood info, can help grease the wheels of your deal, etc. If they're good.
  - zippergz 12y ago
    As I described in my other comment, Redfin is a completely different beast than Zillow and Trulia, because they are an actual real estate brokerage. That gives them direct MLS access rather than having to scrape as the other sites do. [I have no affiliation either, but I used Redfin to find my current house and I think they're great.]
    - Domenic_S 12y ago
      Ok, I guess, but they're different from a normal brokerage in that you can access their database without signing an exclusivity agreement, meeting anyone in person, or talking to anyone at all. They're as publicly accessible as Zillow or Trulia, and from a user experience standpoint they're more like Zillow than they are like your local Coldwell Banker. I get what you're saying about data accessibility, it seems like Zillow just found a way to hack the restrictions (by becoming a broker).
- npsimons 12y ago
  So basically, you're saying the real estate agents are just the next casualty from the collateral damage that is the elimination of friction in society, and they are doing what they can to remain as middlemen.
  - gohrt 12y ago
    Zillow has two sources of data: quality data volunteered by real estate agents, and crap wrong data scraped from everywhere else. MLSes, for all their faults, have rather strict rules about accuracy of their data feed. The best listings on Zillow already sold, months ago.
    - encoderer 12y ago
      Zillow and Trulia aren't scraping. The big hole in Zillow and Trulia is listings under contract. A listing goes "pending" (under contract), the MLS knows about it right away. Which is why people see Redfin updated quickly -- because as said elsewhere, Redfin displays data from the MLS. Sites like Trulia and Zillow also get data from MLS, sometimes directly, usually indirectly thru other data access deals. And they also purchase access to a lot of public record databases, things like that. So when a house goes pending, these sites don't see that until it closes and becomes a public record, unless the agent themselves updates the listing on the site. Most this is explained elsewhere in this discussion, I just wanted to make the point, though, that scraping isn't part of the process. I'm sure it was early on, but those days are long gone.
- DougWebb 12y ago
  I'm married to a Realtor, so I've had plenty of direct access to the local MLS system, and also I've overheard many conversations between my wife and her clients about Zillow. From what I've seen and heard, Zillow's data isn't just delayed by a week; it can be years out of date, and grossly inaccurate as well. Both buyers and sellers are very mislead about property values based on Zillow because they see the last sale price and Zillow's estimate of the current value. Zillow has no idea about the local market conditions though, so it can over or under estimate the current value by a huge percentage. Zillow also uses property tax valuations. The towns in and around my area have gone through a couple of re-evaluations in the past five years, and one thing I've learned is that the local governments value houses quite a bit below market value, for political reasons: owners can appeal the valuation, but only if the valuation is some percentage over market value. So instead they consistently value the houses below market value, and charge a higher tax rate to keep the revenue the same. Most people think they're getting away with something because the valuation is lower than they believe their house is worth, and the handful of people who realize what's going on can't do anything because they don't meet the qualifications for appealing. Anyway, Zillow uses those low valuations as part of their estimate, so buyers coming into the area who are using Zillow instead of a Realtor have no idea how much houses are actually worth around here, and they waste everyone's time arguing about prices and by making low-ball offers that have no chance of being accepted. Realtors hate having their time wasted, because they work on pure commission. So they hate Zillow. As far as Realtors wanting to keep MLS data to themselves so they don't go the way of travel agents, I think it's more complex than that. For one thing, it's the MLS people that are keeping the data secret, not the Realtors. The Realtors have to pay for access to MLS, which would stop if the MLS data were public. That could put a lot of money back into Realtor's pockets. This is significant, because it's up-front money: the Realtor has to pay for MLS whether they have any closings and earn any commissions or not. It's a fixed cost of business, which hurts when you don't have any guaranteed income. Also, Realtors bring a lot more value to the game than travel agents did, at least since the early days of the travel industry. Realtors aren't just facilitating searching the MLS; they're managing the entire multi-month process of buying or selling a home. On the buying side that includes locating suitable areas, managing access to properties for viewing, advising on property value and market conditions, negotiating the offer, helping with inspections, helping to navigate the pitfalls between attorney review and closing (often including helping with a mortgage), and being there with you at the closing. On the selling side there's most of that, plus getting the house prepared for sale, taking good photographs and writing the advertising, holding open houses including the critical Realtor-only open house that shows all of the other Realtors (and, by proxy, all of their clients) your home, and helping you to deal with inspection issues that come up and your final move-out. It's a harsh business to be in, with a huge amount of work for a paycheck that may or may not ever come, and opportunity costs from clients you can't work with when you're tied up managing the deals that your existing clients are working through. Making the MLS data public wouldn't change any of that; instead it would mislead buyers and sellers into thinking they can do it on their own, with no idea about the quagmire they're walking into. Let me put it another way: if you're sued, or put on trial for a crime, you have every right to represent yourself in court. But that's almost always a really bad idea because you're not a professional lawyer, and when you're in court you want someone who does this kind of thing for a living, instead of someone (you) who's never/rarely done it before.
bicknergseng 12y ago
I personally actively dislike Trulia/Zillow. More scams there than on Craigslist even.
- frandroid 12y ago
  What kind of scams?
  - mdaniel 12y ago
    I don't know explicitly what kind of scams the parent commenter was intending, but I can say as an apartment shopper there are plenty of listings for apartments that appear as either just below market rate or sometimes $1000 below market rate. When you email them, they will request one of two things: a tenant application form which will amazingly request your SSN or bank account details, or they will request a cashiers check for "holding the apartment" or a "viewing fee." Don't get me wrong, when I write those out in English here, they seem absolutely a scam, but the way they are presented as an answer to some of the apartment inquiries, it's not so obvious. Those scumbags are skilled, too, just not in any kind of skill one would want to possess.
- gnopgnip 12y ago
  Could you elaborate some of these scams?
ldng 12y ago
For those not in the states nor in the trade, could you elaborate on why realtors dislike Trulia and the likes ?
- encoderer 12y ago
  Because a realtor thinks they own the data. So they resent that Zillow and Trulia are using their data to generate leads, which they then sell back to the agent. Whether it's reasonable to act like they own the data is a different question.

That's right, because they generally have their own proprietary source of data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_listing_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_listing_service), which is a big part of the appeal of working with a realtor -- they learn of new listings faster than you can by relying on public, "open source" data. And realtors aren't stupid; they noticed what happened when other professions that were built on closed data opened their databases up to the public. Travel agents, for instance, used to be the only ones who could search the SABRE database (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_%28computer_system%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_%28computer_system%29), which made it valuable to work with an agent when making your travel plans. Then in the '80s the company behind SABRE started opening it up to the public, first via services like CompuServe and AOL, and then later via the Web. Suddenly travelers didn't need a travel agent anymore; they could get the same booking data right from their computer. And travel agencies as a business sector promptly collapsed (http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/03/travel/travel-agent-survival/ http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/03/travel/travel-agent-survival/). For this reason, the real estate agents have little desire to see MLS data show up in publicly-accessible services like Zillow. The current state of affairs appears to be that it does eventually flow out to them, but with a significant (1 week+) delay -- which lets the agents preserve their status as the people you have to talk to if you want the freshest data.

Domenic_S 12y ago
> The current state of affairs appears to be that it does eventually flow out to them, but with a significant (1 week+) delay I don't think that's true, at least not for Redfin. According to them: "Homes on the MLS show up on Redfin in 30 minutes or less." - http://forums.redfin.com/t5/Inland-Empire/How-quickly-does-MLS-info-get-posted-on-redfin/td-p/433041 http://forums.redfin.com/t5/Inland-Empire/How-quickly-does-M... "Local brokerage sites like Redfin show homes for sale immediately, as opposed to the seven to nine day delay typical for the national portals." - http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2013/03/you-deserve-to-see-it-all.html#.U5Yj9S-yPjU http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2013/03/you-deserve-to-see-it-al... "Updates every 15-30 minutes" - http://www.redfin.com/about/data-quality-on-redfin http://www.redfin.com/about/data-quality-on-redfin The biggest advantage of a local (real human) broker is they know what's about to go up for sale, have detailed neighborhood info, can help grease the wheels of your deal, etc. If they're good.
- zippergz 12y ago
  As I described in my other comment, Redfin is a completely different beast than Zillow and Trulia, because they are an actual real estate brokerage. That gives them direct MLS access rather than having to scrape as the other sites do. [I have no affiliation either, but I used Redfin to find my current house and I think they're great.]
  - Domenic_S 12y ago
    Ok, I guess, but they're different from a normal brokerage in that you can access their database without signing an exclusivity agreement, meeting anyone in person, or talking to anyone at all. They're as publicly accessible as Zillow or Trulia, and from a user experience standpoint they're more like Zillow than they are like your local Coldwell Banker. I get what you're saying about data accessibility, it seems like Zillow just found a way to hack the restrictions (by becoming a broker).
npsimons 12y ago
So basically, you're saying the real estate agents are just the next casualty from the collateral damage that is the elimination of friction in society, and they are doing what they can to remain as middlemen.
- gohrt 12y ago
  Zillow has two sources of data: quality data volunteered by real estate agents, and crap wrong data scraped from everywhere else. MLSes, for all their faults, have rather strict rules about accuracy of their data feed. The best listings on Zillow already sold, months ago.
  - encoderer 12y ago
    Zillow and Trulia aren't scraping. The big hole in Zillow and Trulia is listings under contract. A listing goes "pending" (under contract), the MLS knows about it right away. Which is why people see Redfin updated quickly -- because as said elsewhere, Redfin displays data from the MLS. Sites like Trulia and Zillow also get data from MLS, sometimes directly, usually indirectly thru other data access deals. And they also purchase access to a lot of public record databases, things like that. So when a house goes pending, these sites don't see that until it closes and becomes a public record, unless the agent themselves updates the listing on the site. Most this is explained elsewhere in this discussion, I just wanted to make the point, though, that scraping isn't part of the process. I'm sure it was early on, but those days are long gone.
DougWebb 12y ago
I'm married to a Realtor, so I've had plenty of direct access to the local MLS system, and also I've overheard many conversations between my wife and her clients about Zillow. From what I've seen and heard, Zillow's data isn't just delayed by a week; it can be years out of date, and grossly inaccurate as well. Both buyers and sellers are very mislead about property values based on Zillow because they see the last sale price and Zillow's estimate of the current value. Zillow has no idea about the local market conditions though, so it can over or under estimate the current value by a huge percentage. Zillow also uses property tax valuations. The towns in and around my area have gone through a couple of re-evaluations in the past five years, and one thing I've learned is that the local governments value houses quite a bit below market value, for political reasons: owners can appeal the valuation, but only if the valuation is some percentage over market value. So instead they consistently value the houses below market value, and charge a higher tax rate to keep the revenue the same. Most people think they're getting away with something because the valuation is lower than they believe their house is worth, and the handful of people who realize what's going on can't do anything because they don't meet the qualifications for appealing. Anyway, Zillow uses those low valuations as part of their estimate, so buyers coming into the area who are using Zillow instead of a Realtor have no idea how much houses are actually worth around here, and they waste everyone's time arguing about prices and by making low-ball offers that have no chance of being accepted. Realtors hate having their time wasted, because they work on pure commission. So they hate Zillow. As far as Realtors wanting to keep MLS data to themselves so they don't go the way of travel agents, I think it's more complex than that. For one thing, it's the MLS people that are keeping the data secret, not the Realtors. The Realtors have to pay for access to MLS, which would stop if the MLS data were public. That could put a lot of money back into Realtor's pockets. This is significant, because it's up-front money: the Realtor has to pay for MLS whether they have any closings and earn any commissions or not. It's a fixed cost of business, which hurts when you don't have any guaranteed income. Also, Realtors bring a lot more value to the game than travel agents did, at least since the early days of the travel industry. Realtors aren't just facilitating searching the MLS; they're managing the entire multi-month process of buying or selling a home. On the buying side that includes locating suitable areas, managing access to properties for viewing, advising on property value and market conditions, negotiating the offer, helping with inspections, helping to navigate the pitfalls between attorney review and closing (often including helping with a mortgage), and being there with you at the closing. On the selling side there's most of that, plus getting the house prepared for sale, taking good photographs and writing the advertising, holding open houses including the critical Realtor-only open house that shows all of the other Realtors (and, by proxy, all of their clients) your home, and helping you to deal with inspection issues that come up and your final move-out. It's a harsh business to be in, with a huge amount of work for a paycheck that may or may not ever come, and opportunity costs from clients you can't work with when you're tied up managing the deals that your existing clients are working through. Making the MLS data public wouldn't change any of that; instead it would mislead buyers and sellers into thinking they can do it on their own, with no idea about the quagmire they're walking into. Let me put it another way: if you're sued, or put on trial for a crime, you have every right to represent yourself in court. But that's almost always a really bad idea because you're not a professional lawyer, and when you're in court you want someone who does this kind of thing for a living, instead of someone (you) who's never/rarely done it before.

bicknergseng 12y ago

I personally actively dislike Trulia/Zillow. More scams there than on Craigslist even.

frandroid 12y ago
What kind of scams?
- mdaniel 12y ago
  I don't know explicitly what kind of scams the parent commenter was intending, but I can say as an apartment shopper there are plenty of listings for apartments that appear as either just below market rate or sometimes $1000 below market rate. When you email them, they will request one of two things: a tenant application form which will amazingly request your SSN or bank account details, or they will request a cashiers check for "holding the apartment" or a "viewing fee." Don't get me wrong, when I write those out in English here, they seem absolutely a scam, but the way they are presented as an answer to some of the apartment inquiries, it's not so obvious. Those scumbags are skilled, too, just not in any kind of skill one would want to possess.
gnopgnip 12y ago
Could you elaborate some of these scams?

ldng 12y ago

For those not in the states nor in the trade, could you elaborate on why realtors dislike Trulia and the likes ?

encoderer 12y ago
Because a realtor thinks they own the data. So they resent that Zillow and Trulia are using their data to generate leads, which they then sell back to the agent. Whether it's reasonable to act like they own the data is a different question.