Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

How Accurate Are Listings On Real Estate Sites?

Which I think is a great question to ask and surprising it has taken TechCrunch and the like so long to ask.

Why? Because a consumer searching for a home in San Diego doesn’t care that Trulia/Zillow has 3 million listings nationwide; they care how many listings the search sites in their area have.

Unfortunately for Redfin we’re not in every market but the markets we are in we have almost all the listings.

Where do we get our listings from?

• The local MLS. In some areas (SoCal) we get listings from 5 different MLSes to piece together most accurate MLS picture. But even so we don’t import multi-family, land and other MLS listings. We plan to change this soon.
• Zillow who gives us for sale by owner
• 50+ other FSBO partners
• A bank listed foreclosure partner

What’s missing? Craigslist which gets a large number of FSBOs.

We’re also up front about what our listing inventory includes with the statement, Do I see all the homes for sale on our map page.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.