What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

You could argue that "Zillow is going about this all wrong" if their goal was trying to improve the process of buying and selling homes or if they were trying to make it more affordable to buy a home. What you have to realize is that they have a business that's working very well within the real estate status quo: agents pay them money for ads to get leads, agents who are able to convert leads make a ton from commission, the cycle continues. A public company with an established business model (that prints money!) is not going to pivot and suddenly compete with their well-paying customers.

However, I totally agree that there's a huge opportunity to improve the buying/selling experience and lower transaction costs. My team is working extremely hard on that problem.

Edit: I should note that Zillow has done tremendous work on improving the home shopping process and I'm definitely not trying to knock them on that. They and their competitors have brought the shopping process online and given consumers access to listing info that was previously only available to agents. The actual offer/transaction (the buy button) is the extremely complicated piece we're trying to tackle. It just so happens that in tackling that piece and becoming a brokerage, we get access to a high quality broker-only data feed.

Here is allegedly their letter to the president in 2011 (not related to Zillow but basically how they can throw their weight behind issues):

http://www.ksefocus.com/billdatabase/clientfiles/172/3/1359....

At some point perhaps they might strike a deal work together if they can't' see a way get rid of Zillow.

I am trying to understand how easy it is to go about selling your house on your own using zillow etc, while saving on the sale commission etc that a realtor would have made otherwise.

The story remains.

I know I'm simply expanding on what you already said, but ... one way or another, you have to go look at a house that you intend to buy. And you don't want the seller there. So you need someone who is trusted by the seller to let you in.

If you can put together a service whereby someone other than real estate agents can do that task, then maybe you could gain traction on everything else.

But I have not talked to anybody who is interested in the work of automating everything else until the problem of physical access to homes is solved, because there isn't money in paperwork. The money in real estate comes from two sources - commissions and mortgages. And most marketing plans depend on reducing commissions, not just redirecting them to a new recipient. So it makes much more business sense to ignore the paperwork that agents normally do, and focus on the mortgage process than the inspection, title, closing process.

After all, that paperwork isn't a pain point for buyers or sellers - they don't do it anyway. The agents do. So the attitude becomes one of, "Who cares if an online service automates the paperwork, when you still needed that agent to open the door? Let the agent go do the paperwork, and at least do some work to earn their stupid commission."

Most of the features you described, and the fee structure associated with them, would be in violation of real estate licensing laws. Hence why no one has provided a modern, competitive alternative to real estate brokers: you simply can't under the current regulatory regime. Otherwise, what you've described would almost certainly already exist.

I was working with an agent and I told him I saw several houses I wanted to look at on Zillow. Sent him the list and all but one was sold. He said the listings were in some cases as much as 6 months old.

After that, he just plugged me into the MLS listings directly and then every time a new house would show up, I'd know about it and could email him if I wanted to see it or not.

I totally agree about not trusting 3rd party apps. MLS, unfortunately is the only reliable source I know of.

To amplify: I don't think it's any accident that the 2005 housing fiasco happened in this industry. Terrible pricing information (gaps + timeliness), as well as terrible conflicts of interest (buyers brokers are incentivitized to make the buyer pay as much as possible) make me wonder how much longer these dinosaurs are going to continue to operate the same way.

Would think it's only a matter of time before realtor.com shuts down similar sites like RedFin.

The word is most MLSes use CDNs, so scraping might not be the best way.

http://www.realtor.org/policy/mls-policy/real-estate-transac...

thankfully, someone else was managing the contracts, and we had built a fairly decent feed management system.

i still have nightmares, though.

They don't need a specific "right" to control their servers. Likewise, users on the internet have no "right" to access anything.

[b] Bloomberg probably worked with Zillow.

[c] I'm not sure EFF would be interested in this. It's pretty standard TOS language, and when EFF did get involved in the Craigslist/Padmapper case, it was (correctly) interested in stomping on idiotic CFAA theories of liability and the exclusive license point. If Zillow tried to strongarm journalists, that would be a different story, but they have not done so as far as I know.

Background: I was a journalist before founding https://recent.io/ and would often get approached by companies like Zillow to write about what their data showed.

Who'd have thought that an industry of middlemen would make it hard to reduce friction in their marketplace...

(Source: building websites with MLS integration for real estate offices)

If you DO have access, and you're looking for a solution to use the MLS data via a more simple API - SimplyRETS (https://simplyrets.com) can help with that :) (Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder).

Past that, ListHub, as another user mentioned, is probably the best bet if you're not a member of an MLS - but it's not free.

Still accurate today.

But they only have listings for the regions where they sell homes, so they have nothing for most of the United States.

In some markets (SF, Texas), you have a lot of foreign (read: Chinese) money flowing in fleeing less than favorable jurisdictions. That should hold prices up there (as well as the other obvious reasons SF pricing will be held high; Texas is a new phenomenon).

Other markets though are (in my opinion) being held up by extremely low mortgage rates (<4%), and as soon as the Fed starts their march upward, you're going to see home prices come down. This doesn't even begin to address Boomers who are going to want to downsize to unlock their equity for retirement, flooding the market.

Case in point, my house's Zestimate comes out to $105/sqft, and my neighbor's comes in at $100/sqft. A neighbor without a pool's house comes in at $96/sqft. That would indicate that their "guess" is where the magic is - a price per square foot is computed based on factors that are not readily apparent.

Submitted title was "Zillow using cease-and-desists to kill posts about their listings". I don't think it broke the rule—more likely the submitter was trying to follow the rule by rewording something linkbaity. But since people don't agree about this we've taken another shot.