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

Sold my house this summer. My wife listed the house on Zillow and took nice looking pictures and put a good description. We also paid a real estate agent $300 to list our house in the MLS (and we would handle the rest of the sale). Once our listing was in the MLS Zillow brought in the crapified compressed JPEGs from the MLS feed and overwrote our description etc, and locked us out from further edits. Fail.<p>Zillow is going about this all wrong... their advantage is that they aren&#x27;t the MLS system, they are the best positioned to be an alternative to the NAR cartel. If anything THEY should have agents in every town who will put your house into the MLS for you for $300, as well as allow enhanced listing on their site at the same time... they might actually make some money that way, and also it would solve their MLS problem. Instead they seem to want to beg the cartel for a seat at the table. Pretty sad.

Zillow has substantially mitigated the loss of Move.com&#x2F;Realtor.com by forging direct relationships with numerous MLSs since the cutoff in April.<p>&gt; Since January, more than 300 MLSs have signed agreements to send listings directly to Zillow and Trulia, providing their members access to the largest audience of home shoppers on mobile and Web 1.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;investors.zillowgroup.com&#x2F;releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=925723" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;investors.zillowgroup.com&#x2F;releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID...</a><p>The sampling methods used by the author are extremely poor. Miami, FL on Zillow.com and Realtor.com are <i>substantially</i> different areas. Just do a search yourself and look at the map. Realtor appears to be using the metro while Zillow&#x27;s site defaults to &quot;Miami&quot; only. They need to extract 100% inventory and use exactly the same geofenced boundaries if you want actual 1:1 comparison. Their conclusion may very well be correct but the data sure as hell does not support it.<p>If you want to criticize Zillow, there are far easier methods than this one. How about that Trulia acquired MarketLeader for $355M (Apr 13), Zillow acquired Trulia for $2.5B (Feb 15), and Zillow just sold MarketLeader for $23M. How much of Trulia&#x27;s $2.5B pricetag was in recognition of Market Leader&#x27;s &quot;value&quot;? I&#x27;m guessing we&#x27;ll see at least $200-250M or so drop from Zillow&#x27;s goodwill ($1.8B as of 6&#x2F;30&#x2F;15) on their balance sheet for Q3-15.

If Zillow can solve the &quot;problem&quot; of putting all the docs (disclosures, inspections, offer docs, title docs later on, etc) up with the listing along with making a network of handymen (to help out with prettifying a house for sale), most buyers and sellers will be happy to pay them 0.5-1% instead of the seller having to pay the agents 4-5%. There&#x27;s generally not a whole lot of work in buying or selling a house including agents doing events like open houses and helping with &quot;discovery&quot; and the buyer-seller matching problem. The offer process itself is also quite simple and can be done online. That said, the one benefit of an open house&#x2F;tour hosted by a neutral party, is that it lets potential buyers easily assess a house without having a biased seller in attendance. This can also be managed and does not really require a real estate agent. Zillow and similar services like Trulia have a fantastic market opportunity in front of them.

When I was searching for a house I used 5 or so apps to do so. I found that Zillow had many, many listings that were very old, but were placed up top and the dates changed to make it look like it was just listed. However, checking the actual data for that listing shows that it was not pulled from the market and relisted, it was just Zillow constantly boosting really crappy houses that had been on the site for a long time.<p>In short, trust none of them, use multiple services, and keep looking constnatly. I found my house through my agents MLS system, which was about the time it showed up on the aggregates.

When I was looking for a condo this past summer, I used RedFin. Since RedFin ties into MSLs (basically a list that all realtors use), I knew about listing before my agent could email me about them.<p>I highly recommend it, even if you have a non-RedFin agent.

Getting and keeping real estate listings up to date is a big pain in the ass. There&#x27;s no standardized residential listing data, and while you might get RETS feeds or data dumps from the MLS nightly, it&#x27;s still on you to ensure that all of the information is parsed correctly and displayed in accordance to the MLS&#x27;es standards (or risk being cut off).<p>Often, MLSes have terms in their contract that say that regardless of the source, that their information must be the canonical source for information in some cities -- which is a huge problem with dealing with REO&#x27;ed (Real Estate Owned) properties and the banks that want to sell them.<p>I know of a startup that eventually just resorted to scraping realtor.com (and I&#x27;m sure that they&#x27;re still doing it to this day) instead of dealing with the various headaches of managing the contracts with the MLSes and RETS providers.

The MLS system is a disaster. Think Alien 2 levels of mucousy, dark and dank ventilation shafts. Zillow has never not worked really well for all of my uses (shopping, price checking, looking at neighborhoods, etc), and it&#x27;s done so in a way that no other realty website ever has.<p>The reality is that realtors have a huge vested interest in making it more difficult to shop for a house and generally rely on information asymmetry in a massive way. Zillow is a massive blow to that barrier and I hope they succeed.<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;ve worked for a handful of realtors and with several MLS systems in the past.

One point that this analysis misses is that there&#x27;s often a significant delay between the time a property hits the market (lists on MLS) and the time it hits aggregators like Zillow [0]. If you&#x27;re looking at week old listings in hot markets like LA and SF, then you&#x27;re looking at a batch of inventory that has already been picked through by savvier buyers.<p>For this reason, we always recommend that our buyers use a brokerage-quality data feed like ours [1] or Redfin&#x27;s to monitor for new listings. If you have a reliable data feed and check what&#x27;s new once a day, then you never miss out on the best properties -- much less stressful than clicking and re-clicking tiny icons on a map.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inman.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;14&#x2F;los-angeles-claw-is-first-mls-in-the-country-to-delay-listing-syndication-feeds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inman.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;14&#x2F;los-angeles-claw-is-first-ml...</a> [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openlistings.com&#x2F;setup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openlistings.com&#x2F;setup</a>

FYI: To add some color to the article, here&#x27;s more information about the different relationships of MLS with Zillow and Redfin from a former Redfin intern (posted July 28, 2014):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8096912" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8096912</a>

&gt; So as not to violate Zillow.com’s terms of service we have done so manually (hence the limited number of cities).<p>Can sites have a legally enforceable terms of service that ban automated access? I understand if the automated traffic is high and impacts server performance and cost, but they can ban it even if it&#x27;s limited? I understand sites need to protect their servers, but if it&#x27;s publicly accessible and the traffic is reasonable, I&#x27;m surprised it&#x27;s legally enforceable to ban it. And as shown by this blog post, it still can be done manually so the ban isn&#x27;t very effective.

What annoys me about Zillow is that their &quot;number of days on Zillow&quot; is totally bogus. A house down the street was on the market for 2 months (at a highly inflated value). Time on Zillow? 2 weeks.<p>Maybe the time on Zillow is based on repricing or taking it off the market and putting it back on? Either way if you were looking for homes unless you kept track of an individual house you wouldn&#x27;t be any wiser.<p>Also amusingly the house was a tear down, so the Zestimate was based on the old crappy house. Which I&#x27;m sure the builders loved -- it was half the price of the newly built home.

..aand it&#x27;s gone.<p>I just got:<p>&quot;–This post has been temporarily removed at the request of Zillow. We are collaborating with them to write a more complete version of the story, and will have an updated version posted on October 7th.–&quot;<p>Nothing creepy about that. Certainly doesn&#x27;t leave me feeling that whatever it is the article said about Zillow apparently hit them pretty close to home.

Looking at the C&amp;D letter, it seems that Zillow is saying any use of their site for commercial use is prohibited. Wouldn&#x27;t that cover traditional print journalists doing a similar story, or any story that made use of information gleaned from Zillow?<p>Why didn&#x27;t Bloomberg receive a C&amp;D for this story which says &quot;Bloomberg used data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Zillow Group Inc. and Bankrate.com to quantify how much more money millennials would need to earn each year to afford a home in the largest U.S. cities.&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015-06-08&#x2F;these-are-the-13-cities-where-millennials-can-t-afford-a-home" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015-06-08&#x2F;these-are-...</a><p>I guess nobody except the EFF really wants to take on this type of fight.

Anybody know of any good sources of MLS data for programmatic consumption (even if not free)?

Redfin is more accurate than zillow, They list new listings much faster and the interface is better. I&#x27;m in LA and redfin is superior.

I like how they speculate that where Zillow has more listings that it could be because Zillow has database or data scrubbing problems and not the other way around.

Looks like this article has been taken down by the authors now due to a cease and desist:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inman.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;06&#x2F;buildzoom-calls-zillow-out-for-alleged-data-quality-issues&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inman.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;06&#x2F;buildzoom-calls-zillow-out-f...</a><p>Article is gone from original source too... Obviously nothing to see here folks ;)

As a recent home buyer, I found Zillow information to be at least one week out of date. In most cities, that probably isn&#x27;t a big deal; however in the San Francisco Bay area I found the site pretty useless because all of the homes I was interested in, I was unable to see because they were usually off the market, pending or very late in the process where I was unable to visit the home.<p>I ended up using a Sotheby&#x27;s owned site, with accurate data.<p>Additionally, their Zillow Estimate information is at least 20% low in SF, even by admission of their own analysis: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zillow.com&#x2F;zestimate&#x2F;#acc" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zillow.com&#x2F;zestimate&#x2F;#acc</a><p>The benefit I should mention is that I met a great Realtor through their ads, which he admitted to spending thousands of dollars on per month on.

It doesn&#x27;t seem surprising that Zillow is pump-and-dumping in an already extremely bubbly market.

I lost all faith in Zillow when I realized their estimate was just a number based on their guess at a price per square foot times the square footage...<p>A properties <i>historical</i> &quot;Zestimate&quot; changes if you update the <i>current</i> square footage. Whatajoke!

Redfin is not even listed. Snubbed.

The article&#x27;s conclusion left me feeling kinda meh. The article made me feel like it was leading up to something and then &quot;... is destined for an uphill battle.&quot;. Well, yeah? Anytime you base your business on someone else&#x27;s data, you run the risk of the carpet getting yanked out from underneath you.

Semi related. In Portland every single house on Zillow was actually already sold. I&#x27;m not exactly sure how this works, but it was very annoying. The only app that would show houses that were actually still on the market was Redfin. Has anyone else in a different area experienced this?

Post deleted upon Zillow&#x27;s request?

Article was taken down. Does anyone have it archived&#x2F;alternative link?

Mods: the title of this HN post is not the title of the linked article, which at this writing is the somewhat less clickbaity &quot;What Zillow Doesn’t Want You To Know&quot;. In fact, the c&amp;d part, while important, could almost be seen as a distraction from the larger issues of MLS listing access discussed in the article.