MelissaDelGaudio.net

We’ve known for a while that Zillow is now accepting agent listings on their website. As a REALTOR, I now consider Zillow an integral part of my marketing process. I feel — like many others — that it’s in my clients’ best interests to gain the widest exposure for their listing as possible. As I see it, Zillow.com is another wrench to add to my marketing toobox.

And that is where I see Zillow: as a marketing tool for me, other agents and other homesellers. In his post over at Realty Objectives, “zapocolypse now” Russ gives his opinion that this is no doomsday announcement, and I agree.

Zillow is a great marketing vehicle, but I still don’t see it — or any other marketing site — as a replacement for the MLS. There are two simple reasons for this: timeliness and accuracy. As a member of my MLS I agree to, and oblige myself to keep my listing up to date, and accurate in the MLS. That listing is then added to my own IDX site, and to other marketing sites around the area, and around the country, as well. All the other real estate agents in the area agree to the same terms. Up to date, accurate information is the reason the listings in the MLS are so valuable, and why everybody wants that data. There are thousands and thousands of agents who agree to do accurate, timely, data entry that everyone else wants to scrape.

However, with Zillow, Base, and all the others, no one has that same obligation. From time to time, they’ll send you a friendly reminder to update. But they have no power of coercion to make me update my listing. Certainly FSBO sellers bear no responsibility to keep their listings up to date. You still need to take everything with a grain of salt — and with marketing sites that grain has to be a lot bigger than what might come from the MLS.

Compare that to the Rules and Regulations [WARNING: PDF LINK] of my MLS. Scroll down to Article XI and see what we as agents agree to, in order to keep the data timely and accurate.

Sec. 2. All listing agreements shall be carefully and accurately completed and signed by the owner. Required listing information shall be entered into the service within 48 hours (excluding weekends and holidays) after all necessary signatures of the sellers have been obtained unless otherwise requested in writing by the sellers. The Subscriber or the Principal Broker Subscriber shall not advertise the listing in any system or venue, public or private such as newspapers, homes magazines, internet sites or internal listing systems, until after the listing has been first entered into the MRIS® database.

Sec. 8. Failure to enter or maintain accurate and complete information relating to the listed property information will result in an additional fine as specified on the MRIS® Schedule of Fees and Charges.

It’s this enforceable contract that helps me, as an agent, be sure that the MLS is the authoritative repository of listing information for my area.

It seems to me that lots of people believe that the MLS information is kept up-to-date and accurate by some bit of magic. A lot of people are building business models on this data, and chastising the MLS for not getting it — when they are the folks who do the hard work of getting all the data, centralizing it and cleaning it up for them.

By contrast, I’m reminded of the state of real estate data on the internet BEFORE there was IDX. If you can remember back that far, the information was hopelessly out-of-date, fractured, inconsistent, and impossible to rely on, because there was no incentive for agents to keep that information up to date. Would it be drastically different today if there was no reason to keep the info up to date?

Is the MLS perfect from an accuracy perspective? Not by a long shot, but it is by far more accurate and up to date than any system where there are no rules, no checks, and no incentives to keep it so.

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