Where Do You Search Real Estate Listings?

Next to real estate agents and brokers, real estate investors are the most active participants in local markets. However, unless the investor holds a real estate license and joins the local MLS, Multiple Listing Service, they’re not able to search the listings in that database as agents do. So, like the consumer, real estate investors use online resources for this. There are definitely major differences in the accuracy and completeness of those resources though.

The big sites like Zillow and Trulia

While these sites are very popular and national in presentation, they have been criticized heavily for outdated and incomplete data on homes listed for sale. A recent study done by a competing site in a large number of markets, ZipRealty, indicated that listings on Zillow and Trulia were often in error, homes shown as listed were not really for sale, and many homes listed for sale were not on the sites.

ZipRealty in offering their report analyzed listings on the other sites in 50 zip codes across 13 major metropolitan areas: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, Seattle and Washington D.C. The results of this analysis showed:

Zillow: Only 73% of the listings actually on the MLS were shown on Zillow, while 16% of Zillow listings were of homes not currently listed for sale.

Trulia: Just 78% of MLS listings actually on the site, and 17% on the site actually not listed at the time.

Of course, this was a marketing effort by ZipRealty, and they had much better accuracy, with 99% of MLS listings on the site and only 1% listed that weren’t for sale at the time. Why? Because ZipRealty isn’t just a website for home listings, it’s also a licensed real estate brokerage in the areas where it does business. So, ZipRealty is a member of the MLS and thus gets daily updates of all current listings in the local Multiple Listing Services as a member. And, like it or not, those locally-maintained MLS databases are the most comprehensive and accurate resources for homes listed by their real estate company members.

Does this mean that the real estate investor should be using ZipRealty for their searches, and if it’s not available in their area they’re in trouble? No, this definitely isn’t the case. You see, there is this agreement among the members of these local MLSs called the IDX, Internet Data Exchange. Member brokers agree to allow their brokerage listings to be displayed as part of an IDX search on any member broker’s website. The agreement specifies which information fields can be displayed and all broker site IDX search pages show the same data, though they use many different ways in presenting it.

So, with real estate being local anyway, all you have to do as an investor is to locate a real estate website, even one for a single agent, that has the IDX logo and disclaimer on their search page. You can do this with a search like “yourtown real estate idx.” This will turn up multiple member sites with the IDX search function, and you’ll be seeing all member listings and all updated at least daily. This is by far the most accurate, complete and timely database for local real estate listings.