Searching for a home online, to register or not, that is the question
I am still amazed that real estate websites that exist only to collect potential buyers or sellers names so that they can sell them to real estate professionals still exist.
I was watching something on television recently and noticed another commercial for one of those services that will enable you to get new listings sent to you as soon as they come on the market, I think it may have been just listed dot com or something like that. Now what really happens when you visit one of these services?
Well, before you are going to get any listings, they want your email at the very least so that your contact information can be resold to a real estate agent for a significant fee. The agent who is buying your information likely can't generate enough personal business on his/her own so they have to buy leads so how qualified would the agent I'm assigned be to help me with the purchase of a home. If you do give up your contact information, what happens next?
Well, I've got some anonymous email accounts that I can use to get information without giving up my real identity online as I'm sure many other people have. In this case, I didn't bother but instead I ventured over to real estate dot com, a sister company to lending tree and a division of Barry Diller's Interactive Corporation, IAC. I put the same search into that website as I put into the Charleston MLS on my website. The results are below, proudly in bold, 1 listing found on real estate dot com and 45 available on the MLS. Gee, with the greatest domain name for real estate search, you might think that all the listings would be available, wouldn't you. Apparently, their scraping of the information on the Internet leaves a little something to be desired.
Home Search Results: 1 Listing Found
Showing records 1 to 45 of 45
My understanding is that real estate dot com is no longer soliciting agents to buy leads and that they are rethinking their Internet strategy. Based on the results, I can understand that. What about other search sites like realtor dot com or zillow? Realtor dot com was the most popular site to search for a long time. I spent additional money to get what is called featured listings allowing me to post 6 pictures rather than just one and have a more complete description. I got a few leads and actually sold several homes as a result so my investment paid for itself and yet, I am not renewing for another year because their technology seems to be somewhere from the 90's and other sites are catching up. Zillow came out of nowhere and is now one of the most popular search sites probably because of their automated valuations of homes called zestimates. Even though they are so far off from reality to be almost laughable in many cases, people are fascinated with knowing what their home is worth.
The interesting thing to me about searching on zillow is that unless your real estate agent puts your listing on zillow, you won't find it there when you are searching for homes and many real estate agents won't put the listing there if the zestimate is significantly different (lower) than the listing price. So what do you do and where do you search, do you register or not.
If you are interested in the Charleston South Carolina real estate market, your best place to search is a real estate agent's site that lets you search directly from the Charleston MLS. Some agents require registration, others don't. I offer a choice, basic search with no registration required or advanced search with registration. The reason that I offer a choice is that since you can search with no registration at other sites, I'd rather you did it at mine and if and when you felt comfortable, you would ultimately provide me with your contact information so that I could be of additional help.
By the way, I get registrations from time to time from emails that don't exist like joe at yahoo dot com or bill at aol which really do you no good because an email is sent to those addresses giving you the password to search further. If you provide a bad email address, you'll never get the password. If you want to protect your privacy, here's a tip: go to yahoo, hotmail, gmail from Google and get an anonymous address to use that works so you'll get the password needed to search.
And if you want to receive auto notifications of all new listings, which I believe are the most valuable information you can get to get an understanding of the Charleston real estate market, you do have to register but here is the difference, I won't sell your name to someone who is desperate to get their money's worth and bug you until you buy. I'm here to provide you with good information and professional real estate help when and if you are ready.