Mar. 16, 2007: On-line real estate databases can fall short of buyers' and sellers' needs
Realogy, the giant, publicly traded conglomerate of big-name brokerages, recently announced a deal whereby it will feed all of its listings to realty.bots, Trulia.com and Google Base.
That's a mouthful. First, what's a realty.bot?
A realty.bot is an Internet start-up that plans to undertake some part of residential real estate transactions, usually as an adjunct to selling advertising.
Trulia.com, Google Base and PropSmart.com are listings.bots, acquiring listings by scraping Web sites, direct entry and data feeds.
Zillow.com and several others are AVMs, or Automated Valuation Methods, and Zillow is graduating to a direct-entry-only listings.bot.
Redfin.com can seem like a realty.bot, but, as with many other new entrants, it's really a brokerage with a higher-tech front end.
A better bright-line dividing point might be face-to-face, end-user contact. We may come to the point that a realty.bot is distinguished from other vendors by being untouched by human-hands, a completely automated real estate product offering.
What's interesting about Realogy's initiative is that it moves millions of real estate listings onto realty.bots. The natural conclusion to be drawn is that realty.bots are the new MLS.
This is false. Online real estate search tools (their name is legion) are a great place to shop for a home, but they turn out to be a poor place to search for a home.
There are hundreds of searchable data fields in a true MLS database, as compared with a few dozen in a realty.bot's dataset. Moreover, MLS systems are policed for accuracy and availability, with fines assessed for errors.
I tend to communicate in listings, with both buyers and sellers. In addition to all the other things a professional Realtor can do with the MLS system, it's the absolute best tool in our arsenal for pricing homes.
Even after we've found your perfect home, we'll be talking back and forth in listings to make sure the price is right, to assess future resale value, to make sure we didn't miss something better in the neighborhood.
These functions require a full, robust MLS database.
Greg Swann is the designated broker for BloodhoundRealty.com, a full-service Metropolitan Phoenix real estate brokerage. This article originally appeared in the West Valley regional sections of the Arizona Republic.
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