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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 the

• 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.