Why is it that when I am looking for a home I find houses on other sites that I don’t see in my MLS search that you have set up for me?
Heartland MLS is Kansas City’s only database for realtors to upload homes for sale. It is the primary source of real estate data. Heartland MLS charges a fee to secondary sources ie: Zillow, Trulia, and all the other portals where you find real estate listings. They contract with Heartland MLS as to how often the feeds come to their websites. It could be weekly, daily or hourly. Many of these sites are only getting weekly feeds.
Of course, the most timely and accurate information is going to come directly from the Heartland MLS search that only a realtor can create for you. I routinely get clients that will search for homes on other websites and then email me a long list of homes that they found that are not in their MLS search. 99.9% of the time all of those homes are all either under contract or sold, and the reason they are not in your MLS search is because of the status change. Zillow is probably the worst of them all, they keep real estate information for a long period of time and also do a horrible job of showing correct data.
Zillow says this home is worth $200,000 but the sellers have it listed for $250,000 – is this home overpriced?
In our market, Zillow’s “zestimates” are probably the most inaccurate information they publish. Most often, they actually base their zestimates on the public record of county filed mortgages which may or may not have anything to do with real value. See the chart below to see how accurate Zillow rates themselves in our market compared to other markets.
