Get ready for a shocker – the vast majority of online real estate sites are a waste of time for a real life home buyer. If you were buying a home in your town of choice and you knew there were 10 homes that met your criteria – would you use a site that only showed 6 of them?

Sadly the vast majority of consumers have no idea that when they’re on the major Real Estate search sites this is exactly what’s going on.

I’m not going to name names in this post, but the bottom line is that virtually all the real estate vertical search players as well as the real estate sections of the top horizontal search engines get their home listings via broker/agent syndication feeds.  What this mean is that in order for these search engines to have complete coverage, they have to get every agent or broker to upload every new listing, every day. And as a result, no matter how terrific their User Interface (UI) is or how much other information they throw around the properties on their site – they are missing big swaths of current listings that consumers want and need.

They’ll deny it, they’ll tell you that they have “92%” of the listings – but what this really means is:

They know there are x number of active Multiple Listing Services (MLS) listings in the country;

Their database has y # of total properties;

x/y = 0.92;

That is very different from having 92% of the actual MLS listings that are active in any given market!

What it means is that they have a ton of other stuff in the database … foreclosures … homes that were already sold … strange hybrid listings … and so on.

The truth is that only those websites owned by, or operated on behalf of, an actual Real Estate Brokerage or Agent have access to the full MLS data set.  There is one exception, Realtor.com, which by virtue of its relationship with NAR gets access to the vast majority of MLS listings.

So here’s a tip - there are two real estate data acronyms to look for that will help you as a home buyer determine if you’re likely looking at the complete MLS data set.  One is IDX (Internet Data Exchange) and the other is VOW (Virtual Office Website).  These types of data sets typically (although sadly not always, more like 9 out of 10 times) mean you are viewing almost everything available from the local MLS.  Look for them in the home listings themselves or at the footer of the real estate websites you’re using.

“Wait a second,” you say … “isn’t your company Roost.com a vertical search site subject to the same limitations?”

Well I’m glad you asked! If you poke under the hood, Roost is actually a hosted network of individual Broker and Agent websites with a smart search engine on top.  That allows us to do a lot of cool things, but most importantly for this discussion it means that when you’re searching on Roost, you’re actually looking at a Broker or Agent’s website which has access to the good stuff.

Go ahead … give us a try … click here.

Alex Chang
CEO of Roost