On line real estate search is undergoing massive change in how and where listings appear on the various web sites battling for dominance in the market. Most consumers (and many real estate agents) pay little attention to news items involving Zillow buying Trulia, News Corp buying Move, Inc. (owners of Realtor.com), ListHub (owned by Move, Inc and a leading syndicator of listings to search web sites) breaking up with Trulia and Zillow, etc. If you like to visit these sites mainly to satisfy your real estate curiosity and look at pictures of houses, these news items don’t really matter too much. How complete and up to date the information on the various search sites is does not really matter all that much, they are close enough in accuracy and current enough to satisfy your purpose. But if you are actively trying to buy or sell a home, it is definitely in your best interest that you understand a little more about how these changes affect which sites you should use and how you use them. If you are using an agent, you also want to be sure your agent thoroughly understands what is going on so they can properly market your property if you are selling or help you look in the right places to find properties if you are planning to buy.
A little background may be helpful. Once upon a time, real estate agents were primarily the gate keepers of information. If you wanted to know what was for sale, you had to go to a real estate office and look through a multiple list book showing current listings. In the mid 1990’s, the Internet was beginning to blossom, and the National Association of Realtors (NAR) created Realtor.com to put information on real estate listings on line. Unfortunately, NAR did not understand much about the Internet, committed millions of dollars to a poorly thought out and implemented on line strategy, and ended up having to sell Realtor.com in order to keep its debts from dragging the whole organization down.
Zillow and Trulia were later launched by entrepreneurs who recognized that there was a tremendous void of good on line real estate information and search tools. Given how poor a job NAR had done with Realtor.com and that placing listings on Zillow and Trulia was free, many real estate brokerages as well as MLS systems fed their listings to Zillow and Trulia, seeming to only realize later that Zillow and Trulia’s main business model was selling ad placement next to those free listings – using free listings to sell ad space to the competitors of the agents who supplied the listings. ListHub was started to facilitate feeding listings to Zillow and Trulia along with the myriad of other on line search sites that have popped up since. In this area, most brokers syndicated using ListHub and and most properties listed on TMLS could be found on real estate agent IDX search sites, Realtor.com (greatly improved by its new owners), Trulia, Zillow and some other similar sites.
Fast forward to 2015, and on line real estate search is starting to become fragmented. Realtor.com and ListHub owner Move, Inc. was bought by News Corp and Trulia was aquired by Zillow. Some brokers rebelled at the practice of their listings being used to promote their competition and pulled out of syndication entirely. Turf wars began and are still going on. The upshot to those interested in complete and current information on real estate listings is that ListHub no longer feeds Zillow and Trulia and individual brokers and agents must now feed their listings directly to these sites if they want them to be there. Some will, some won’t, and some may not even know about the change if they have not been paying attention. Realtor.com will continue to be fed most of the TMLS listings and eventually Zillow and Trulia will probably catch back up.
If you are selling a home and think having it on Zillow and Trulia is a good thing (and for most properties, I think it is) you need to make sure your agent understands what is going on with these sites and makes sure your listing is included by a direct feed or added individually. If you are buying a home and relying on one of these sites as your primary search tool, you need to understand that they may not include all of the listings available on TMLS so you may miss out on something if you only use that one site. For listed properties, an MLS search set to email you when a listing that fits your parameters is added to the system is still the best way to get the most accurate and current information available.