Less is More

Sellers contract with brokerages and specifically chosen agents to represent them through the marketing and sale of their homes. Sellers often interview multiple agents and make their selection based on the agents, market knowledge, experience, references, marketing and technical abilities. The selected agent comes to know the house better than anyone else. The agent uploads the data and the photos they have taken to their MLS Board. The data will be verified and double-checked with their sellers to assure accuracy. The various brokerages have mutually agreed to share this data to benefit their sellers and bring the listings to the widest possible market. To the best of my knowledge most brokerages have a direct feed to Realtor.com (National Site) so that the public can access all of the latest listings all across the country within hours of them being uploaded without having to know the local brokerages’ names. This is the way it used to be. All in all a pretty good system. You have cooperating brokers working together to bring their individual brokerage inventory to the widest possible market for the mutual benefit of sellers and brokerages. Then when we (listing brokers) weren’t looking we were sold down the river! The MLS boards sold our data. I am not sure how this happened. I don’t remember being asked, polled or any discussion about this taking place, it happened behind closed doors.

So what does this mean for listing brokers, sellers and consumers?
The listing broker now has to ensure that the data is accurate on multiple sites. I now have to have accounts with Zillow, Trulia etc. I spend hours correcting the mistakes in the data and uploading photos that I have previous uploaded into my MLS. Furthermore, Zillow reserves the right to override any data that is input manually. On one of my listing they had the price listed $50K more than the actual price. Even after going into the Zillow site several times to manually correct it, it kept reverting back to the wrong price. Eventually, I had to cancel out the listing and start over. These inaccuracies in the data in the none official sites are a detriment to sellers, brokers and consumers.

If you type Real Estate for Sale into Google it returns 763 million results. The same search using my town’s name specifically will return 6,680,000 choices! The key players in this race to the first page of Google are Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, Homes.com. RE/MAX, Keller Williams and a variety of other Real Estate Brokerages. I urge the consumer to go to the source of the data and that is the brokerages sites. The listing broker and the brokerage houses are vested in providing accurate information about their listings. After all the sellers have contracted with us, the sellers have placed their confidence in us to accurately represent them. The consumer/buyer can feel confident that the brokerage sites will provide the most up-to-date and accurate information about all the listings. Furthermore these sites are free of advertising. They provide detailed accurate information about all of the current listings and also provide you a way to reach the listing broker directly who is your best source of information about individual listings.

Less really is more …