First, Our Experience:
Georg and I utilize Zillow.com, Trulia.com and Realtor.com extensively in marketing our listings. We find that with each of these sites, particularly Zillow.com, we need to continually/daily monitor our listings; making sure that the photos are not duplicated or removed; checking that the marketing remarks clearly explain to the prospective Buyer that they should phone us, or visit our website, to learn more about the property rather than rely on “Premier Buyers Agents” who pay up to $375/month, hoping that the prospective Buyer will contact them about a property and neighborhood they may know little about.
This is very frustrating, and we have considered dropping Zillow.com, BUT we know that the traffic is extremely high there and that prospective Buyers still utilize this site, unaware of the challenges we face in terms of accuracy and knowledge. We do not want to miss any opportunities for our Sellers, so we monitor these sites and on occasion our Sellers do too! We also contact Zillow.com to express our frustration over having out-of-area agents placed next to our Listings as if they are experts on our properties and community.
Lastly, we strongly encourage our Sellers and Buyers to IGNORE valuations from these sites. The only valuations you can trust are from experienced, busy, educated local Brokers who “know the inventory”.
This article from MSN Money tells it all!
Please feel free to share your experience with these sites.
The backlash against Zillow & Co.
Real-estate
agencies are taking a harder look at national aggregators. They say the
websites can be inaccurate, frustrating potential buyers.
It
used to be a given for anyone selling a house that a real-estate agent
would put the listing on national real-estate aggregator websites like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com to maximize exposure and sell the home quickly. But that could be changing fast as aggregators and agents face off.
Since
2005 or so, real-estate agents have shared data about homes they have
for sale with those national sites, which have millions of visitors
(Zillow, for example, had 32 million last month). But even though the
sites have grown, sales haven’t in the distressed housing market,
and some agents believe the sites may not be helping. They accuse the
sites of engaging in practices that give buyers inaccurate information
that may hurt sales.
Among their complaints are that the sites
allow any agent, for a fee, to have his or her name and photo appear
prominently beside the homes listed for sale in a given region, even if
the person in picture isn’t the agent representing the seller. In
reality, the agent in the photo may know little about the property or
the neighborhood where the house is located, frustrating customers’
efforts to get accurate answers, according to a report last year by
real-estate consulting firm Clareity.
Some
agents also claim that many listings on the largest sites are
inaccurate. “The wrong photos often appeared with our listings,” says
San Diego Realtor Jim Abbott, whose firm no longer shares data with the
national sites. He also says that the sites kept up listings that were
no longer on the market. Clareity CEO Gregg Larson says Zillow and
Trulia get information about the same property from multiple sources,
such as the listing agent, the local multiple listing service and
syndication services. “The duplicates sneak through, and then you have
(the same) listing with different prices, listed by different brokers.”
One Massachusetts agent, Jack Attridge, notes in a letter to Inman News
that because homes he’s listed appear on national sites, he’s often
contacted by agents and customers well outside his area who have
questions about those properties. Most of the time, they have incorrect
information, and Attridge wrote that none of those calls has resulted in
a sale.
Buffett Bullish on Housing
These
and other problems hurt agents’ reputations and do nothing to sell
houses, they say. Abbott argues that inaccurate Web listings, combined
with side-by-side links to agents who know little about the property,
frustrate potential buyers and may actually drive them to look
elsewhere.
Abbott studied three years of his agency’s sales data
and compared listings that the company didn’t share with national sites
to those it did. “Time after time, the listings that we did syndicate
compared with the listings that we didn’t had no better outcomes,” he
says. “In fact, the ones we didn’t syndicate often sold faster” and
closer to the asking price.
Days on Market
57.1% | Sold/Orig LP Diff. % 
-25% | Sold/Orig LP Diff. % 
