Jan 19

Real Estate Search Engine Comparison

This test was conducted Friday, Jan 18th for zip code 30107.

Kris Berg in San Diego recently wrote an article comparing and contrasting the different real estate search engines. Please read her article, as I don’t want to rehash her excellent points. My goal is to apply her analysis method to our local market here in Cherokee County and then interpret these results for our local audience.

To echo Kris’ point, your local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is the most comprehensive resource for accessing available homes on the market. In our case, the local MLS is First Multiple Listing Service (FMLS) with some overlap from GA MLS.

In order to get a sample size that is easy to handle and within most search engine results limits, I chose Ball Ground, GA as my test market. Specifically, I searched zip code 30107 and found these results:

These results raise many questions…

What is the real number of Active Listings in 30107?
233, FMLS is the industry standard in this area and they have the most accurate listings.

Why does Metro Atlanta have two MLS systems? Why don’t their results match?
Historically, GA MLS was used on the south side of Atlanta and FMLS was used on the northside. They have both grown to cover the majority of Metro Atlanta and overlap in almost every single county. As for why the results don’t match…FMLS is used by more brokers in Atlanta and especially so by those brokers on the north side of the city.

Why do Realtor.com and Zillow.com show more results than actual listings?
They must pull their results from FMLS & GAMLS and combine the two, instead of parse them.

Why is there deviation by one or two listings among the closest results to FMLS?
FMLS is constantly updated throughout the day and most of the search engine sites only download the data at night. Thereby creating some slight variation depending on time of day viewed. (*Buyer tip – search first thing in the morning to get apples to apples or subscribe to daily email updates of new listings.)

What are REW, dsSearch, and Listingware?
These are third party IDX providers that local agents and brokers hire to aggregate data from the local MLS. Instead of referencing local agent’s websites themselves, I just listed the commonly used IDX providers who generate the agents’ search results. Maxsell.net uses iHomeFinder for it’s third party IDX service.

I hope this comparison clarifies the difference of real estate listing search engines results. I think it further confirms that real estate is local and working directly with a local Realtor is the best source for accurate listings and data. However, it is imperative that the local Realtor understands these differences. If you are a Seller, your broker better be submitting your listing to all of these services in addition to the oodles, vast, hotpads, and other similar services as referenced by Kris in her article.

In my goal to clarify things, I am certain I have created more questions than I have given answers for. I encourage you to comment below with any questions you would like for me to answer.

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About Brad Nix

Brad is the managing broker and co-owner of Maxsell Real Estate and co-founder of REtechSouth. He is also an accomplished commercial agent in the North Atlanta real estate market. Brad also serves as the Vice President for the Cherokee Association of Realtors and as Director for Security Bank of North Metro. Brad enjoys real estate, technology, good music, nice people and dark beer.
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  • http://www.diversesolutions.com Andrew Mattie

    To be fair, I (software developer for Diverse Solutions) was notified of the issue regarding the missing properties when you called in on Friday and spoke to one of our sales reps. The problem wasn’t that our database was missing any properties, but rather that many of the zip codes in FMLS are specified as Zip+4 instead of the normal 5 digit zip code. Our IDX solution would have previously required you to search for properties in every single one of those Zip+4 areas to get all of the different properties, but that’s no longer the case. I suspect that other IDX solutions were / are having the same issue.

    Additionally, I’m not sure if the sales person conveyed it to you or not, but our IDX solution only searches a few property types by default. If you go our demo link right now, put in the 30107 zip code, and just click search, you’ll only see 205 properties. However, if you first click on the “Advanced” section and check the “Condo,” “Land,” “Lot,” and “Multi-Family” property types and then hit search, you’ll see 369 properties (the exact same number as Realtor.com).

    While I do agree with you that it’s always good to work with an agent, I just wanted to clarify exactly why you were seeing what you were seeing.

    Andrew Mattie
    Diverse Solutions

  • http://bradnix.com bradnix33

    Andrew:

    I appreciate your team’s response time to this issue of Zip+4. Your sales person was very kind and responsive. It seems you have a good team at Diverse Solutions.

    In fact, I am thoroughly impressed with your latest mashup using the Zillow neighborhood data (http://www.diversesolutions.com/zillow-neighborhood-demo/). Any chance this sort of data exists for Metro Atlanta?

    Finally, I’d like to see your IDX solution boil down to match the local MLS and not Realtor.com. Can we schedule a time to test FMLS single-family residential results vs dsSearch single-family residential results in zip code 30107?

  • Pingback: Real Estate Search Engine Comparison Test | ImmediateRealEstate.com

  • http://www.diversesolutions.com Andrew Mattie

    I haven’t yet downloaded the Georgia data to see what neighborhoods exist, but Matt Fox from the Google Earth Library did (http://www.gelib.com/zillow-neighborhoods.htm). You can see all of the neighborhoods for Georgia here: http://tinyurl.com/282fz6.

    I’m not quite sure that we’d ever be able to match what any given MLS says 100% of the time. There’s actually two reasons for this, which I’ll describe below.

    First, FMLS gives out the same feed to to all IDX vendors and to Realtor.com. Since all of the vendors get the same exact data, and since that data comes directly from the horse’s mouth per se (although FMLS’s FTP server is actually run by MarketLinx), all we can do is match or exceed what other vendors (and Realtor.com) do with the same data.

    Second, since our IDX system is so central to a map, we only show properties that have valid addresses. In the case of zip code 30107, 87 of the 452 properties in FMLS’s system are unmappable according to all of our data sources. Sometimes the agents provide bogus data, and sometimes our data providers just can’t locate the address, but either way, we aren’t able to show them. I know that it is certainly not an ideal situation to not show properties, and I know that it does reinforce what you said about it being a good thing to always work with an agent, but it’s just something we had to accept when we built our mapping system.

  • http://bradnix.com bradnix33

    Andrew:

    Your Tiny URL does not work, but I would love to see the local neighborhoods. From what I could tell looking at Zillow’s data…it seems they only the City of Atlanta (Fulton County) and Augusta, GA. I am specifically looking for Cobb and Cherokee County (City of Woodstock) neighborhood mapping solution.

    Thanks for clarifying the data feed confusion. Since by default your solution counts “land” and “lot”, then there is no wonder you can’t map them all. Many times in this suburban area land is just raw dirt, never been developed, never assigned an address.

    Please contact me directly about your services. I have many ideas and questions.

  • http://www.diversesolutions.com Andrew Mattie

    Brad,

    It looks like your blog encoded the period as part of the URL link, which it’s not supposed to have at the end of it. Let’s try this again: ( http://tinyurl.com/282fz6 ).

    I couldn’t easily find your personal email address on the site, so please feel free to email me directly. While I probably won’t be able to give you the service and response times you can expect from our sales staff, I’ll be more than happy to do my best answering any questions you have about our products.

  • http://www.zillowblog.com Drew Meyers from Zillow

    Hey, it’s Drew from Zillow. I just want to clarify something real quick.
    “Why do Realtor.com and Zillow.com show more results than actual listings?
    They must pull their results from FMLS & GAMLS and combine the two, instead of parse them.”

    Zillow is not combining listings from FMLS & GAMLS — we do not receive data from MLS’, but rather straight from brokerages and agents.

    Also, though I would prefer if Zillow had the 387 figure you quoted for that zip code, I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. How did you get the 387 number? I just did a search and it showed up with 47 results.

  • http://bradnix.com bradnix33

    Drew:

    Thanks for clarifying that Zillow does not pull from FMLS or MLS. I feel weird apologizing for giving you guys too much credit. 47 is a far cry from the 231 actual (today) active listings. 387 really did sound better (although still inaccurate).

    I got the 387 number from reading the For Sale ‘matching results’ and did not realize that the true number of Zillow listings for sale was displayed on the map (47).

    I apologize for missing the number. However, it did bring to light that this may be misleading to other buyers, sellers and/or Realtors when searching on Zillow. What does the current For Sale ‘matching results’ of 419 actually represent?

    Brad Nix
    bnix[at]maxsell[dot]net

  • http://www.zillowblog.com Drew Meyers from Zillow

    Brad-
    I see 276 right now as the total count when i do a search for “30107″ — that means, on the map view, there are that many listings. Note there are other zip codes shown on the map, such as 30115 and 30151.

  • http://bradnix.com bradnix33

    Drew:

    Where did you get 276? There are 231 listings in FMLS today for 30107. If you remove the ‘pendings’ and ‘contingent-other’ from this list, you get 228 active listings with no strings.

    I am still confused when using zillow. I just entered 30107 in the zip code and clicked ‘search’ from the home page and I see 419 matching results. The map shows Ball Ground, Big Canoe, Canton and barely Waleska. Even if you add up all those numbers from each town in view, I only get 149. What does 419 For Sale matching results really mean?

  • http://www.zillowblog.com Drew Meyers from Zillow

    What zoom level are you on?

    Also, check your search filters — depending on what settings you have selected, it’ll tally the total properties that fit those parameters.

  • http://bradnix.com bradnix33

    I was just using the default zoom, which appears to be one click out from ‘city’. If I zoom 1 click in to city, the results change to 56 matching.

    I was also using the default filters. Which if I change the type to just Single-Family it gives 395 at default map the same 56 at city level zoom map.

    I still haven’t determined what the actual For Sale ‘matching results’ refer to? Can you clarify where these 419 or 395 For Sale properties are located?

  • http://www.zillowblog.com Drew Meyers from Zillow

    Please read my prior comments — it’s the total number of homes that fit the selected search criteria that show up on the map view you are currently looking at.

  • http://bradnix.com bradnix33

    OK. Got it. I guess I am just disappointed with the lack of coverage and thought surely there was a better answer. How do you plan to grow your coverage?

    I guess this goes to further illustrate my original point, “it further confirms that real estate is local and working directly with a local Realtor is the best source for accurate listings and data.”

    Keep me posted as your market coverage grows.

  • http://www.LaneBailey.com Lane Bailey

    I ran a similar test (although without as many different aggregators) with similar results in another ZIP code. Here is the result.

    http://lanebailey.com/2007/12/13/mls-zillow-trulia/

    When I started looking at the results individually, I ran across a lot of sold properties as well as withdrawn and expireds that were still listed as for sale.

    Good job.

  • http://sandiegohomeblog.com Kris Berg

    Brad, My little look into the mysteries of search engines was done quite some time ago, but it is always an interesting exercise. I agree that it underscores our value in searching for homes, even in this freedom of information age. It can all be very confusing to say the least.