As many homeowners and homebuyers know, there are a multitude of tools and websites out there to use to search for homes. You don’t have to rely on any one site to find information on homes in your area. However, there are pitfalls to many of them and so I thought I would call out some of these sites and their benefits and negatives from an end-user perspective. In the end, there is really only one search tool that is fully capable to help you find homes and I will talk about that as well.
Some of the most popular sites out there from a MLS home search perspective are Realtor.com, RealEstate.com, REMAX.com, Zillow.com, Trulia.com, AZCentral.com. In addition, you can find home search tools on many Realtor sites across the area. Some of these are good and others are lacking. I will talk about the most popular ones here.
Realtor.com
Realtor.com is actually run as “The Offical Site of the National Association of Realtors” and is the web’s most popular website for searching for properties whether they be in Chandler, Arizona or Chandler, Oklahoma.
With a recent update to the site, Realtor.com is impressive in its collection of MLS data and presentation, and the tools it provides site visitors. However, Realtor.com has a serious drawback from a consumer perspective – not all the information that is known on a property is shown and more importantly, not all of the pictures are shown!
Take for instance the following property where 4 photos are shown. In the local MLS for Phoenix and surrounding areas, would you believe that there are actually 24 photos!
If a buyer was using Realtor.com to search for properties only, they would not have any idea beyond the available photos as to how nice the property really is and if other features of the property work well for them. Property photos tell a lot more to buyers than any other property information and to limit their showing puts visiting buyers at a disadvantage.
Realtor.com is also prioritizing certain properties over others as seen in this example. So, you are being shown certain properties first above others based on what Realtor.com wants to show you first.
Why? Because Realtor.com makes money by charging Realtors like me to ‘Showcase’ properties which means that they expand the number of photos and allow additional content added to each listing by the listing Realtor. So, visitors to the site don’t know that they aren’t getting all the information that may be found otherwise. From a Realtor perspective, our own national association is essentially charging us in order to get the full visibility our properties should have for home buyers anyway!
As for the data reliability, the data should be reliable in Realtor.com. So, it is a good tool to use, but remember that information is deliberately being held back and certain properties are being prioritized for the homebuyer when they may in fact not be a good match. And given that pictures tell a thousand words, how many stories are being kept from the prospecting home buyer looking for a home in the Phoenix real estate market.
Aside from this, Realtor.com is a good tool around to search for properties. However, because of its purposeful limitations on information on properties, buyers should be be more diligent and use other tools as well.
So, we will continue to review sites to find the best tool out there to search for homes locally.
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