What’s the best way to look for homes online?

One of the first things I do before working with any buyer is to have a face-to-face meeting in my office for about 15-30 minutes. While I’m sure many agents will gladly just “open doors” for strangers, I have a higher standard for working with clients and want to make sure they’re making best use of their time. I have a motto that every minute spent in my office planning will save literally hours of time, expensive gas, and avoid frustration. Besides, when a customer and professional want to accomplish a project together, isn’t a meeting a no-brainer?

There are (3) main reasons why this consultation is important with a Real Estate agent:

1. The Realtor and buyer make sure that their goal is realistic and their perception is shared of today’s market.

2. The buyer and agent agree what resources will be used to determine what homes will be viewed.

3. The buyer and agent decide they want to work with each other.

In this blog, we’ll discuss buyer resources for searching for homes.

It’s no secret that the newspaper is not an accurate way of looking for homes currently listed for sale. If you want to see today’s listings for sale you look online, right?

Wrong.

Let’s examine this closer. Let’s look at the two most visited Real Estate websites: Realtor.com and Zillow.com and see how accurate their listings are.

I searched for homes in Anaheim, CA in both websites and compared them to the Multiple Listings Service (MLS), the live database that Realtors use. You’ll be surprised with the results:

Realtor.com: 603 homes for sale

Zillow.com: 500+ homes for sale (the webpage defaults to a map search that can only show 500 at one time.)

Multiple Listing Service: 222 homes for sale

That means that more than half of the homes you’re viewing on these popular Real Estate websites have already sold. While this may be a good way for a buyer sitting on the fence to get an idea of the market, you can imagine it’s NOT the way to go for someone looking to put together a list for their Realtor to show them properties.

Why the discrepancy?

Keep in mind that the #1 goal of just about any website is to have traffic. They want as many visits as possible so they can charge sponsors fees. Real Estate is no different than any other item being sold: the consumer wants something tangible they can browse and compare against other options. The more listings they see, the more engaged they become.

What resource should be used for looking for a home?

I always give my clients access to a tool called Listingbook. Not only does it download data from the Multiple Listing Service multiple times a day to ensure accuracy, but it’s a great way to organize what homes have been rejected or picked by either the Realtor or buyer. With Listingbook, a buyer can leave notes for their agent and vice versa. Over time, showing lists can be created and it makes for a much more efficient way of communicating than just sending emails, texts, or hand written lists back and forth.

You’ll need a Realtor to create a Listingbook account for you to have access.

While Listingbook continues to be a great tool, it doesn’t have a mobile version for the buyers constantly use their phone to look at listings. Even with that flaw, it can be much more useful than many of the websites that show listings that have sold long ago.