With thousands of Real Estate websites, finding the right one can be a challenge. Do a Google search and you’ll find the most popular real estate websites like Zillow, Trulia, and Refine. Once you get past the first page, even less popular sites now have the same home search features. So how does a home owner or buyer know where the best site is? Before choosing, you must first understand a little more about how they all started and what they really are.

For many years, if you were in the market for a home, you would have to go to the local Real Estate office in the area you wanted to buy a home in and ask to see a list of homes for sale. This listing was a hard copy of the homes for sale from the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS). The listing gave him basic information about the houses and some marketing insights. She scanned it, then asked an agent to show her houses he thought she might like.

This was great for real estate agents because, as ports of this information, buyers had to come to them. It also gave the agent the opportunity to show the houses that the agent himself was listing first. For the buyer this was not so good. It was difficult for the buyer to know if the agent was there to represent them or the seller and if they wanted to see homes in more than one city, they might have to go to other real estate offices to see other MLS listings. These listings could also be out of date and by the time you have found your dream home, it may already be sold. This process can be time consuming and stressful for even the most experienced buyer.

Fast-forward a decade or two and there have been some major changes. MLS went digital and consolidated into larger MLS companies covering even larger areas. Here in Western Washington we now use the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) and it covers all but two counties; Clark and Clalam. In the 90’s, the Internet brought the first Real Estate websites. Most of these showed the houses listed by the agents/agencies that own the website and were not updated very frequently. Some of the larger real estate agencies, the ones with the money and resources, began creating home search tools using data directly from the MLS. Now, for the first time, buyers don’t have to talk to an agent to find homes for sale and can get even more information (photos, schools, map locations, and up-to-date status).

Today, the price of producing these high-quality websites has dropped to the point where the average agent with the right skills can create their own. We now see an explosion of Real Estate websites and it seems that most of them have home search features. This leaves buyers confused about which website to use.

Now that buyers can get information from almost any Real Estate website, what do they need to know before choosing one? First, here in the state of Washington, any licensed agent can show you and represent you at any MLS listed house, no matter what website you find it on. Most of these websites have a mobile app or are mobile friendly. While most buyers start their home search online, what they don’t understand is that the website they use to search for homes is a lead generation tool for the agent. The buyer is exchanging his contact information for the use of the website.

This is not a bad thing. If you really want to buy a home, you’ll need answers to your questions, help finding financing, an agent to open doors for you, someone who understands the paperwork and can help you with negotiations, and a trusted agent to take care of you. in the closing process. That can only happen when you talk to an agent. Which agent you get is the important part. And that’s where finding the right website comes into play. The buyer should use these websites to find out more about the agent they might want to represent them. Finding out more about the agent before you get involved with an agent is the key to achieving your goals of buying or selling a home.

What you should be looking for is what the real estate agent experience is. Do they work full time as a licensed real estate agent? What is your closing success rate? Do you guarantee your services? What do previous clients have to say about the agent’s service? These questions can sometimes be found on the agent’s website, but if not, you should ask at the first contact with an agent. Now that you know how they got started and what they are, how do you choose the right website for you? First, let’s talk about the differences in these websites. We can divide it into four types.

The first type are the big non-brokerage sites like Zillow, Homes.com, Realtor.com, and Trulia. These sites do not have agents working in the field. What they do is sell leads that sign up to their site to agents hoping to convert the lead into a customer. These websites have worked hard to make sure home buyers find their site first. They’ve added a lot of great tools that estimate home values ​​or mortgage calculators and all the information you can get on almost every house in the US and some other countries. They get most of this information from the public record and from what some homeowners may give them. The downside of these sites is that the information they use may be out of date or inaccurate. Take home values, for example, because they get their sold data (what price homes in the same neighborhood sold for) from public records, not the local MLS, their numbers may be behind market trends. In the world of Real Estate, we only look back at the last six months to help us determine the value of a home. While a home’s sales price may appear on the public record right at closing, it can take months to sift through the system before these websites can include it in their data, and that will throw their numbers off balance. There is also a question about friendly houses. When a real estate agent or appraiser does a comparable market analysis (CMA) of a home’s value, they look for homes like the home in question (the home being appraised) of the same size, same bedrooms, same bathrooms, same size property, same neighborhood and same state. This can be a bit of an art and the question is: can a computer do as good a job as an agent? This can leave home buyers and sellers confused about the true value of a home.

I’d like to take this opportunity to weigh in on home values. In a free market, like ours here in the US, the true value of a house is exactly “the highest price a buyer is willing to pay and the minimum amount a seller is willing to accept” for any property. Only when a property is sold can the true market price be established and everyone else, realtors, appraisers, county appraisers, and any website, is just making an estimate or guess.

The second type of Real Estate websites are the large and mid-sized brokerage houses like Re/Max, Windermere, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, RedFin, and ZipRealty. These companies have multiple brokerages in many parts of the US These Real Estate companies have agents who work directly for the brokerage houses, usually as independent contractors. Leads or leads that sign up on their sites are assigned to the individual agent or sometimes sold based on the companies policies. These companies take a large part of the commission or payment from the agent, and some of them take 60% or more. This means that the agent has to work harder to convert as many leads as possible into customers just to make enough money to stay in business. Sometimes these agents take on more than they can reasonably handle, leading to poor customer service or a higher rate of transaction failures. Some of these companies give a refund to the buyer. This reimbursement comes out of the agent’s commission and can make it even more difficult for agents to provide good service to their customers. I have heard many complaints about agents disappearing once a contract was signed or agents refusing to show houses to buyers looking for houses at the lower end of the market and still wanting to write the contract and get paid. commission.

The third type of Real Estate website is small or independent brokerage houses. These businesses are generally owned and operated by experienced agents who have the skill and knowledge to create a good quality website and provide good service to buyers and sellers alike. You’ll find the same home search tools and email notifications as on the big sites, and because these sites serve local communities, these sites often have more information about the areas they serve and consumers can read more about the sites. agents they may want to use. in buying or selling their homes. These companies may have one or more agents who work together as a team or as independent agents and typically have a higher successful closing rate. What makes these sites the best option for home buyers or sellers are the agents that accompany them.

The fourth type of Real Estate website is the independent agent website. These websites are created by the individual agent or by a third party on behalf of the agent. They can be as good as any of the larger trading sites, depending on the skill, time, and money an agent is willing to invest. These agents can be very good agents, but most of them are little more than one page public resumes posted by agents hoping to attract buyers or sellers to the agent they are promoting.

So when considering a real estate website, buyers and sellers should keep in mind that a website won’t help you buy or sell your home, it’s the real estate agent. The website is a way to find the right agent to do the job. Think of it this way, since you can get home information from almost any website, what value do you get from a website? The value is in the service you receive from an agent who can save you time, money and the heartache of poor treatment or poor service.

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