Zillow, Trulia or Realtor.com? How to Search for Homes Online

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Kirk Duckwall here with BRIX Real Estate and the House Geeks. Today, I want to talk about how to best use sites like Zillow, Trulia or any other third-party marketing based sites. What do I mean by marketing based? It’s that these sites make their money by selling advertising space to realtors and real estate brokers. The key is not to use them to search for homes but to research homes. It's been found roughly 30% of the information found on this sites may not be currently accurate.
So I've pulled up a few examples of this. First, we have this property on Heatherton Ridge Drive in Savage. Zillow is saying this property is off the market. However, if I go to an MLS Direct site, we can see that this property is actually active and available for showings. It's been on the market for a couple days now. Zillow and Trulia show a lot of this foreclosure properties as well. Here's an example on Dundee Avenue in Apple Valley. Going back to the MLS site, we can actually see that this property sold and this one sold back in 2016 for $260,000.
When you do find the properties that do say for sale on Zillow, for example, we have this 2300 Explorer Court that says the property is for sale for $289,900. Going back to the MLS Direct site, we can see that this home has an accepted offer contingent upon inspection. As you can see, you can spin your wheels on a whole lot of properties that may not currently be available or missing ones that actually are.
Now, I did mention that these sites are good for researching. So, if we go back to the Explorer Court, we can scroll it down and pull up information as far as price history of the home; when it may have last sold, what it sold for or what price changes that may have happened, along with tax information as far as how much the tax may go up or down each year.
I also really like the information that Trulia has, as far as crime maps. They have what I call the heat map or it shows areas that may have higher crime versus others. What you want to look for is MLS Direct sites or apps.
The MLS is the multiple listing service. Every major city usually has one of these for realtors and brokers. As a consumer, you want to find sites that have broker reciprocity programs. These are the sites that will show every listing by every brokerage.
Hopefully, you found this information helpful. Take care and have a great week.