Are You Relying on Outdated Listing Information?

Commentary by Errol Samuelson

RISMEDIA, May 8, 2008-When you shop for milk at the grocery store, “best if used by” labels alert you to the age of the product and keep you from buying a quart that’s about to spoil.

Freshness counts in real estate, too. Whether you end up the owner of the home of your dreams or miss out to somebody using a better real estate site, may depend on whether you’re relying on property listing information that’s past its pull-date.

With dozens of places on the Internet to look for homes, it’s no wonder that four out of five home buyers today rely upon online property listing information. Unfortunately, at most sites consumers have no clue as to how much time has passed since the data they are looking at has been refreshed. Because it’s the Internet, most people assume that information about something as important and expensive as a house is current, and it usually is-but not always.

Some listings are updated only every two weeks or even longer. Most are refreshed once a day, but is that adequate? On average, about 13,600 homes are sold in America every day[1]. Every day thousands of properties go up for sale on the nation’s 900 multiple listing services-databases of property information operated by real estate brokers. Tens of thousands more listings lower their prices to make the properties more attractive to buyers. The newest Internet tools-such as site that provide bi-monthly payment and property valuation tools-are less valuable and potentially misleading unless they deliver current, valid price and listings data. In today’s fast-paced real estate markets, buyers with better and fresher data have a distinct advantage over those that don’t.

Most multiple listing services feed their data at least once a day, but that doesn’t mean the information is making it onto the website you’re using. Most multiple listing services require brokers to enter changes into the MLS within a certain time period, typically within 48 hours of taking the listing. Once in the MLS, which is open only to real estate professionals, the data is distributed widely to brokers’ websites and to national sites where consumers can access it. But thousands of listings come from other sources-newspaper classified ads, other real estate sites, even from property owners themselves. In most cases, there is no way you can tell when the listing you are looking at was last refreshed.

At REALTOR.com, we feel it makes no sense to use Information Age technology to deliver horse-and-buggy data, especially for something as important as buying or selling a home. When consumers look for a home on our site, we want them to be confident they’re looking at the most current listing data available. That’s why one-third of REALTOR.com’s 4.3 million property listings – over 1.55 million homes for sale – are updated at least every 15 minutes during the day from 203 MLS partners, delivering the freshest, most current national selection of real estate listings on the Internet. Just under half a million of our listings are refreshed at least twice daily and virtually all of the site’s listings are refreshed at least once a day. The average listing on REALTOR.com is refreshed about 13 times a day. Soon, we will time stamp every listing on our site-just like a pull-date on a quart of milk-so consumers will know when the listings they’re looking at were last refreshed and be better prepared to negotiate for what perhaps may become their next home.

[1] NAR Existing Home Sales Report February 2008

Errol Samuelson is president of REALTOR.com.

For more information, visit www.Realtor.com.

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