A homeowner recently wrote to me asking that we remove their listing from our site as the listing had been cancelled. As always, I looked into the issue, and found that the property had indeed been removed from the market and that it had been listed by an agent with another company. Checking our home search, I looked for the property and confirmed that it wasn’t on our site any longer. Being curious, I decided to google the property some more and find any other instances of it being listed on the internet. What I found surprised me, but considering what I know about the internet and real estate, I guess it shouldn’t have.
On this particular listing, I was able to find reference to it on several sites. The listing had been canceled over twelve days earlier, but there it was. I wasn’t too shocked that I found it, listings have a tendency to linger around the internet longer than they should and if the agent doesn’t know the tools they use and how to use them, some listings just seem to last forever and ever. I checked the big sites first, namely Trulia and Zillow. Trulia had the listing, but did correctly note that the listing was no longer active. Zillow listed it, but was ambiguous as to whether it was active or not. I did note that the former listing agent was in the lead spot on the agent ads, which indicated to me that Zillow would still be feeding the leads to that agent. Like I said, this isn’t all that uncommon, it was upon digging further that I found the real surprise.
One of the sites that returned as a search result happened to be the former listing agent’s office website. When I navigated my way to their site, I was presented with a rather unappealing listing page generated by their IDX provider. Much like our home search, the home search was powered by an third party IDX company – there are quite a few out there. The surprise was that the IDX feed showed the property as active. Twelve days after the property was taken off the market, the listing was still for sale according to the site.
Our IDX provider, Diverse Solutions, has been with us since we relaunched this site about a year ago (and before that Matt had used them for personal sites for about three years) and we love their product. It gives our visitors a gorgeous map based home search and is easy to use. What makes it even better? The IDX feed (a stream of data provided by the San Antonio MLS direct to them) is updated every fifteen minutes. Here was another site that hadn’t been updated in twelve days! Every fifteen minutes our site gets a fresh set of data reflecting new entries into the market, price changes, new info and photos, as well as deleting sold and cancelled listings. It doesn’t get much more up to date than that (unless you use the MLS directly, which only members of SABOR can do).
We’re proud of bringing you this data and promise to continue to stay current with search technology to better your experience on our site. We love having you return day after day looking for that perfect home and thank you for the business generated from this site. Next time you’re thinking about listing your home for sale, don’t be afraid to ask your agent about their technology – accuracy does matter.
image courtesy of seantoyer