Yes or No?
In general it is a good idea to allow your home to be shown on as many web sites as possible when it is on the market. I won’t go into all of the details but with ‘broker reciprocity’ if your home is listed on our MLS than it will appear on a zillion web sites. It may also appear on national web sites like Realtor.com, Zillow or Trulia. Those sites get a lot of traffic because they have homes for sale in almost every market.
I have done some testing and I can honestly say that homes don’t sell faster because they are on more web sites. What they really need is to be in our MLS and to have stunning and or amazing photographs, that does help sell them faster. Photographs make a huge difference. There should be at least 20 and none should have date stamps on them and all should be professional quality photos that are good enough to be published in a book or magazine.
It isn’t just up to me if the homes I list are put on all of the national and local web sites because Minnesota sellers have some choices about what sites their home is displayed on and weather people are allowed to publicly comment on the home or if their is a home valuation displayed with the listing information.
Sometimes people do not want their home address displayed on the interent. Sometimes buyers will review a home and say that is is over priced and has tacky decor and sometimes the home valuation will show a value that is 40% less than what the home is listed for.
It gets complicated but we have a new form form sellers to sign when they list their homes and it gives them the option of not having their home on all the web sites with homes for sale.
Here are the choices the seller has:
47. Option 1. Shall the property listing be displayed on the Internet, including sold information? Yes No
48. Seller/Owner understands and acknowledges that if Seller/Owner has selected “No” for Option 1,
49. consumers who conduct searches for listings on the Internet will not see information about the listed property in response to their searches.
51. If “No” was selected at Option 1, skip Options 2-4 and sign below. If “Yes” was selected for Option 1, continue to Option 2.
53. Option 2. Shall the listing address (house and unit numbers and street name) be displayed on the Internet? Yes No
55. Option 3. Shall an automatic valuation of the property listing or a link to an automated valuation be displayed adjacent to the listing? Yes No
57. Option 4. Shall comments or reviews of the property by persons other than the displaying broker be displayed with or attached as a link to the listing data of the property? Yes No
It is my own belief that more information is better and I would be inclined to allow all information to be displayed. I am not sure about buyer reviews. There are online reviews for most everything I want to buy. Sometimes they are helpful and sometimes they are useless.
I am glad that you have encouraged your clients to have high quality photos. As an agent many miles away from you in Virginia, I know that my clients want to see photos of the homes that they plan to see before the get on a plane and fly out to St. Paul.
Those photos may be the deciding factor on which homes get on the short-list!
Photos are far more important than Trulia or Zillow whose content is inaccurate at best. My blog gets a fair amount of traffic, but I have found that click-throughs to my listing pages on my blog can equal or better Zillow and Trulia. So it is not essential to have your listing on those sites.
Having worked with many buyers, I will add that what gets seen and what gets crossed off the list very much depends on the photos. Of course the best photos in the world won’t help if the subject is in bad condition or overpriced.