Searching high and low for homes
There are all sorts of websites available for real estate consumers to search for homes and the other day, I decided to visit several and see how easy to use they were and how many listings were available and the results were surprising.
Here's the search parameters. Single family homes selling between $300,000 and $400,000 in Mount Pleasant zip code 29464 and Summerville zip code 29483.
The Charleston MLS delivered the following results:
Mount Pleasant had 71 and Summerville had 66 active listings in the Charleston MLS so how did some of the listing aggregators and search portals do? As you'll see, some were high, some were low. The highs I can understand because there were likely some homes being offered for sale by owner (FSBO) and it wouldn't surprise me if homes that were under contract or already sold had not been updated either by the listing agent or by the feed. But when there are fewer, and as you'll see, quite a number less than is available in the MLS, then I have to question why anyone would bother. If you want to search for Charleston real estate, wouldn't you want to see every available home for sale.
Trulia returned 189 homes for sale in Mount Pleasant and 140 homes for sale in Summerville. Zillow had 74 in Mount Pleasant and 95 in Summerville. Yahoo! Real Estate had 90 in Mount Pleasant and 69 in Summerville. FrontDoor, the newer website from HGTV, only had 36 Mount Pleasant real estate listings and fewer still in Summerville, only 18. I don't know what Locale is doing but check this out, 5 listings in Mount Pleasant and 1 in Summerville (and you couldn't even specify the desired zip code). Google base was a disappointment and that surprised me. there were 77 Mount Pleasant listings and only 32 Summerville listings. A bigger disappointment was that a lot rather than just single family homes was included in the results.
And that brings us to the next issue, how easy to use are some of the sites and this is where I was most surprised by how difficult some were to navigate when putting in search parameters. I would have thought Zillow which has amazing technology would have been world class with a search interface and it was clunky at best. Google of course is the search engine of choice for most everyone but their real estate search seemed to have technology from years ago. Trulia was excellent, Yahoo! was OK, FrontDoor was very nice and Locale was limited at best but with so few listings, why bother.
So that's my little test and I can't help but wonder why people searching for Charleston real estate don't stay local and get their information directly from the Charleston MLS. And not to brag (but I will), the map based search on my website is hands down, the easiest to use and most advanced search technology available to search for Charleston homes for sale. If you're looking for Charleston real estate, start your search now!