When it comes to real estate search, think local, not national
Why home buyers should use local real estate sites When it comes to searching for homes for sale, it is absolutely essential to use the best tools for the job. While name recognition and a big marketing budget help drive people to the big national real estate sites, those people don’t know their home search efforts are being hurt by poor data.
Too many house hunters start by looking at the big national sites for property, but that is not generally the most complete source of real estate listing data. National real estate sites frequently confuse their visitors with stale listing data that is sometimes months or years old–properties that aren’t available and haven’t been for quite some time. Worse still, some listings that are on the market will not be show on the site.
This can be a big frustration to home buyers searching for homes. For instance, if a buyer is searching for Portland homes for sale, but is spending hours each day looking on a national site for Portland real estate, they may be wasting hours of their precious time with incomplete or outdated data. Suzy Homebuyer finally thinks she found the perfect home for her family, shares the listing with her husband, and makes contact with a Realtor® about the listing, only to find that the listing was sold or removed from the market six months ago.
This is quite common, actually – and there is a lot of debate among professionals about how realty data is stored and disseminated on various sites. The old listing benefited the real estate website owner who got a lot of traffic on the site as result of the stale data. It also benefited the agent who advertised on the site and sent the buyer to inquire about the listing. But the end user certainly wasn’t benefitted.
The best way to make sure you are not wasting your time by search for Portland homes or any other real estate is to make sure you are searching on a local site, not a national one. The fact is that there isn’t a service available that reliably displays listings on a national scale in a fresh and timely manner – but there is a local technology for doing it. It’s called the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), and a real estate agent who is a member can provide you with access to search the complete MLS database of homes for sale – and they will be fresh, accurate listings. It’s just a matter of using it.