Finding The Right House - Buying : ALL ABOUT.....Portland.Oregon.Real Estate

Finding The Right House - Buying

Date: Sep. 30, 2009
Tags: Buying, Finding The Right House, Buyers Agent, Rmls

You're searching for a new house, condo or other real estate on the Internet and you feel confident you can find your “dream” house without the aid of a Realtor®. You want to "go it alone". If you are only relying on search engines, such as Zillow, Trulia or Realtor.com® for example, you may miss finding the house of your dreams altogether.

Last weekend at an open house a buyer came through indicating she was working with a Realtor® but was also looking on her own. She asked a few questions about the area and I mentioned some properties for sale. Not only did she not know where the areas were, but she had no clue on how to find them. By doing that kind of search, she'll keep running around town searching but never finding what she's looking for.

Did you know?

***Our Realtors’® Multiple Listing Service (RMLS™) has the most accurate up-to-date listings.

***You might think the Internet posts property listings instantly, however, Zillow, Realtor.com® or Trulia for example, update from our RMLS™, do so at intervals and lag behind. They could lag behind by a day, a week or longer. If a property came on the market in the morning, an offer could have been received and gone sale pending long before the third-party site ever posted the property for sale and you will have missed it.

***The problem with an "MLS" is that there is no nation-wide "MLS". Realtor.com® receives its listings from Realtor® boards and MLS service providers around the country. Not everyone is mandated to use the same software and same system. Some local boards and servicers have the option whether to reciprocate their listings with other organizations. Realtor.com® then takes these millions of listings and tries to process them and puts the information out to the public. It is a logistical and technological nightmare. I have known of instances where it has taken over a week for a listing to show up on a national search site and many times the information such as price, bedrooms, etc. are inaccurate. That has happened to me more than I can count with my own listings. I will do a search on the Internet, and some other search site picks up the property listing that's for sale, but the data is all wrong. Yet, it is my property listing and I have the information correctly posted. I’ve seen my listings even appear on other agents’ sites within my own company with inaccurate information because that agent appears on a different search site that didn’t pick up the accurate data either. The third-party sites also don't seem to remove some old listings with inaccurate data from past agents. Case in point was one of my listings. It had been listed before by other agents over the history of the house and the "old" listings had never been removed by either the agent or Zillow.

***Many of the sites let you set up your own search parameters but they are limited. Is a bedroom listed as a den or can it be a 4th bedroom? Does the bonus room have a closet that can be used as a bedroom? Are the houses listed as 3 bedrooms instead of a potential for 4th or 5th? Even on my site on-line, you can enter your own parameters. Of course, the more information you include in your search the more results you will obtain, however many more houses likely will be eliminated entirely.

*There have been many occasions when a property appeared when doing my own search for a client but didn’t appear on theirs. That’s because we as agents have many more search parameters in our RMLS™ available to us than the public. The IDX feed (stands for Internet Data Exchange) and provides the searchable fields you’re interested in filtering. On third party sites not every database field in our RMLS™ is searchable by the public. By searching those IDX-enabled third party sites you could miss many property listings because they just won't get captured.

***A daily “hot sheet” is available to us Realtors® through our RMLS™ where we see the activity instantly 24/7. If a property went sale pending, back on the market, or went sale pending all in the course of one day (which happens in a hot market or certain market areas) most of the websites can’t keep up with that fast-paced activity. Third-party sites show properties that are already in escrow (sale pending) as sold. Once they get sold, the property falls off their national listing websites. That property could be a sale fail and come back on the market, but the search engine wouldn’t show it as active because it had fallen out of their system.

***Further, houses that are for sale don’t always come on the active market. There have been many times in my career where one of my listings sold in the office or by another agent I knew by word-of-mouth. Other times I have called a client of mine who I knew was looking for a property just like it. You’d never find those property listings in a search on Zillow, etc.

Of course, I’m the Realtor® talking and am biased. Your best bet is to become a client of a Realtor® who has your best interests in mind to help find that right house for you. You may not find your dream home on Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, or Craigslist because it may not show up on their site, ever.

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