Note to Realtors and consumers - ZILLOW now posts property listings
... But then so does Craigslist.The San Francisco Board of Realtors recently reported, "Zillow.com, the home valuation web site, is inviting real estate professionals to market homes they have listed on its site. Posting a home for sale involves creating a profile with a photo, writing a description of the property (which would include its special features and, perhaps, a message from the owners about what they love about the home), uploading photographs of the property and providing neighborhood and contact information. Because Zillow.com is an advertising-supported site, the postings are free. According to Hitwise, Zillow.com is one of the five most-visited real estate sites on the Web with three to four million people visiting the site each month."
After reading this, we went up to try and use this service to list several of our properties. Instead of using IDX which is a link to information in MLS (multiple listing service) like Realtor.com does, information had to be re-entered by hand which was very time consuming. We also found that they required information not always available from public records. For example, one of the pieces of required data is square footage.
Some recent lawsuits in San Francisco have been based on misrepresentations of square footage. Several deals have been lost because square footage was quoted which turned out to be incorrect. So Realtors may not be eager to quote that figure when showing property, let alone by putting it in print. To post it in Zillow and then represent it as accurate could be quite misleading. This is also true with two other required statistics; year built and lot size. Again these are not always available or accurate, even in public records. So to require them to be entered before the listings can be published should be changed, in our opinion, or at least add the word "approximately" in the description to minimize agent liability.
Most Internet companies are hard to contact. But we let our feelings be known by e-mail. We will see if Zillow listens to our concerns. In the mean time, if you use this program to search for real estate, be aware that the information provided might not be accurate and should be verified before it is relied upon.
- Mick Orton
posted by SFResidence.com @ 7:45 AM
1 Comments:
Drew from Zillow here-
Thanks for writing – we are listening. I have one quick thing to clarify – the only pieces of information that are required to post a home for sale are the sale price & an e-mail address (in addition to checking the affidavit stating you are the true listing agent). If you continue to have trouble with this, please e-mail me directly with details so I can investigate. My e-mail is drewm at Zillow dot com.
Regarding the requirement that information has to be re-entered manually -- we firmly believe that when it comes to consumers and finding a home to purchase, the more information they have at their fingertips, the better. That’s why we included the ability to add a “Home Description” and “What the Owners Love”—although we do realize this requires a bit more work. Please let us know any further feedback that you have to make our site more useful or easy to use. Thanks.
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