Real estate websites lacking decent search engines and criteria

[MikeJaquish]

Originally Posted by kokonutty

GIGO! And certainly much of the information input on these websites or the sites that are accessed by these mainstream sites is garbage. Why should it be so difficult for a "real estate professional" to understand the difference between a condominium and a single family home and to click the proper box when posting a listing? Why shouldn't they post correct and complete information about lot size and HOA fees? For that matter why should that same professional make constant references to "dinning rooms?"

When hiring an agent to sell a house I certainly would be checking some of their recent listings to see if they are dedicated and professional enough to even getting the listing information correct if they want my business.

Delegation doesn't help. Many agents use a low-paid assistant who inputs listings without ever seeing the property.
And, often that assistant has even less supervision than the agent does, and no review of their work.

[CCCyou]

Originally Posted by taketwo2

Hi all, This has been really baffling me how so many real estate websites lack good functioning search engines and multiple choice options for the types of properties a buyer is looking for. Zillow for one and some of the information we find is confusing or incorrect information. How could this be? I thought information has to be right. We called on one property that was listed as having over 26 acres only to find out it had less than 1 acre.

We find that searching for property with a house and acreage that the choices for the search engine on most sites you can only choose one or the other such as 'House' or 'Land.' Unless I am wrong and am not using these sites correctly can someone tell me how to use the sites? If I am using them correctly can someone explain why I cannot find properties that include a house With acreage? This has been really hard to do any searching and I feel like we should have gained alot more from the hours and hours doing these searches and not coming up with much.

Yes - they ALL suck. however,

We sold a home with 2 acres near DFW(too slow and too low) because of how inconsistent the 'lot size' parameters work.
Took almost a year to sell (because house looked priced too high), and about 50Kcheaper than we should have gotten.

On the flip side, we bought a home with 40acres cheap! because the listing looked like it only included 1 acre and had NO viewers/interest/offers.
Bought 100K cheaper than their original listing price!
So overall, we made out!