Is It Available Or Not?

IS IT AVAILABLE OR NOT

Hey, can you explain something to me? This always frustrates me. How come when I find a home on Zillow, and I reached out to a particular agent about that house. They say to me oh gee sorry, the house is off the market. Is the house really off the market, or they just don’t want to show it to me? Or it’s not their listing, are they just pulling some funny business? How come the big site doesn’t show you the house are off the market, why is that? Can you explain that to me please? Sure, I can.

Zillow in most cases is agent driven, the MLS, right? Reports the accurate data. So if I’m an agent and I put a house on the MLS, it then either feeds into Zillow directly by opting into the automatic feed. Or the agent goes and manually inputs the listing into Zillow. Now if they manually put the listing into Zillow, and they don’t follow up with the price changes, the open houses or the fact that it’s under agreement, it will remain active. Because it’s the agent’s responsibility to go in and make those changes.

If those changes aren’t made, it remains active. Now that misleads the public. Some people say well, the agents leave it active because they want to get leads out of it. Sorry, that house isn’t available, let me show you something else. It’s kind of the old used car trick, come Lisa, a car for 129, right? No money down. And then you get to the dealership, it’s the car way in the back that’s hot pink with one mirror, right? Or they don’t have, sorry that car is sold, let me show you the other ones.

But the real discrepancy is Zillow isn’t an automatic feed on every MLS, for every property. Sometimes agents put the information into Zillow themselves, and if they don’t follow up with it, meaning they’ve marked it under agreement or contingent in the MLS, and it still shows active for you as the buyer, that’s confusing. And then all of a sudden it’s frustrating because you want to see that house and you like it, you think it’s a good deal, you want to go out and take a look at it. You make the call to whatever respective agent that you use on Zillow, including myself in the North Reading zip code 01864.

And I say to you sorry, that house is under agreement, you’re going to be irritated, right? So the best place to get the best most up-to-date market data is from your agent, is from whoever you’re working with, right? It’s kind of like if you’re working with the agent, they should have the tools to provide you the information that you want in a timely fashion. You shouldn’t have to go looking at Zillow, Realtor and all the other apps that are out there. You should be able to go to an agent who provides you with the mobile app SearchwithEvan.com that provides you with an up-to-date MLS, the BostonMLS.com that will give you the real information of every listing and all the time, so you don’t need to wander off to those big sites that aren’t really policed and not really accurate.

So the next time you see a house that’s active on Zillow, and you’re curious about it, give us a call, give your agent a call and say hey, I’m interested in this place. But be ready for them to say sorry, it’s under agreement. Sorry, it’s under contract. Sorry, I know you said it had an open house but it really doesn’t, that information is not accurate.

The agent you work with should be able to provide you with the tools, Searchwithevan.com mobile app, the Bostonlist.com on your desktop to see what the real information is. That way you’ll know what you’re looking at, and you have a fair shake at what’s on the market and what the real stats are. Thanks for listening to Russell Realty minute @WorkwithEvan on twitter feed, EvanwiththeRussellteam.com.