Where are you searching
I was talking with Jay Thompson, the Phoenix real estate guy, the other day about an idea I had for a new post about where real estate consumers were searching for homes on the Internet and Jay took my idea in an even better direction than I was originally thinking about. Jim Duncan at Real Central VA picked up the idea, he said he shamelessly stole the idea from Jay (I love the word shamelessly, don’t you) and localized it for the Charlottesville area so I’ll shamelessly do the same and localize the results for the Charleston South Carolina real estate market.
Jay dispelled the notion that Wall Street Journal reporter Shelly Banjo asserted that you can see a listing of every home for sale on Trulia or Zillow. Jim questioned whether consumers might “get drawn into the false sense of completeness that these sites offer.”
While Trulia seems to do a better job than Zillow about offering every listing for sale, Jim pointed out that in Charlottesville, Trulia somehow had even more active listings than the MLS. I noticed that on Zillow, searches for both Summerville and Mount Pleasant homes for sale included listings that weren’t even located in either community.
| Active Listings | Trulia | Zillow | Charleston MLS |
| Summerville | 1362 | 372 | 1436 |
| Mount Pleasant | 1221 | 396 | 1676 |
| Charleston | 1820 | 665 | 2563 |
If you want to search for homes for sale and get the most complete information, find a good real estate agent’s website and search the “real” MLS. Or Click here to search the Charleston MLS on my website.
By the way, if anyone is interested, I was going to write about a website that one of my visitors commented about on my blog. I don’t know whether she works for the website or not but she seemed to think it offered great information. She mentioned Resortscape and SecondSpace. I checked out resortscape and they offered only a total of 4740 listings worldwide. Granted, it is aimed at the luxury market but the Carolina Coast has thousands of luxury listings alone so if you are really serious about finding a home, wouldn’t you want to see every available home for sale that meets your criteria.
Why are there so few listings on this site. Well, you have to pay to advertise. A homeowner can pay $19 per month to advertise their home for sale. An agent can pay $49 per month to advertise up to 20 listings. That is not very cost effective for what I’m sure is a very nicely targeted but somewhat small number of views.
And if you would like to find an agent, they’ll gladly hook you up with participating agents who will likely pay them for the lead. They are called lead generator websites but that’s a topic for another day.