The world of marketing homes for sale on web sites is misleading, sometimes deliberately so. I saw an advertisement in a neighborhood newspaper about how many visits the web site of a local real estate company gets and how home sellers should have their home listed on it.
The ad more or less says that if you want your home listed for sale on our website then you need to list it with one of our agents. What the add doesn’t say is that if you list your home with any agent from any local real estate company it will end up on our site and appear to be one of our listings.
When someone lists a home with a local real estate company, and we can use my company as an example, the same information appears about the home appears on like a zillion web sites. Usually, the listing information is fed directly to participating sites directly from the MLS. The same feed also sends it to Zillow and Realtor(dot) com and many other sites.
As a home seller if it is important to you to have your home listed on the web sites of the largest local companies or on the web sites with the most traffic listing your home with any REALTOR® from any real estate company should work.
The system may be confusing but it also gets all of the agents in the area competing to find a buyer for all of the homes that are listed. Your house is also used as bait by agents who pay to get “leads” from sites like Zillow.
Real estate agents pay to have their contact information next to the listings. In fact, the reason the sites are free to consumers is because of advertising revenue from real estate agents. Yet consumers often see the site as an alternative to real estate agents.
People who are selling their home without listing it with an agent can and should list it on Zillow. There is no one place where all of the homes that are for sale by owner are listed so it is important to go where the traffic is.
The spring market is heating up. The number of homes for sale was up slightly from record-breaking lows but in the last few weeks home buyers have been shopping again and making offers. We are still in a strong seller’s market.
Also see: Broker reciprocity
Also, see: Agency
