“I got a call just the other day on a property in Temple … and it closed two years ago,” said Mona Fullmer, agent at Joan Mikeska Realty in Temple. “It gets pretty confusing for the consumer at large. They argue with us, they say yes it is, it’s on this Web site. It’s very frustrating sometimes.”
Belton real estate agent Terri Covington said a woman once telephoned, yelling at her for advertising the house she was living in when it was not for sale. Ms. Covington found the property up for sale on the Internet all right, but it wasn’t her company, Covington Real Estate, that had posted it.
“The tenant living in the home kept having people slowly drive by the house and some people even stopped to ask her about it. The owner called us to find out what in the world we were doing!” Ms. Covington wrote in an e-mail. “The information was completely erroneous. The house is not for sale and hasn’t been in years. We have never had it listed. As I looked at the ‘Belton properties,’ I found a lot of very old, bad and incomplete information.”
A spokeswoman for a Web site that keeps a database of 3.5 million homes for sale - Zillo.com - said the company strives to keep its listings accurate and current. If agents see a problem, she said, they can easily flag the listing by clicking on a box and the information will be updated that evening.
“If it turns out the home sold already, and the listing shouldn’t be up anymore, we’ll take it down immediately. And we’ll work with the feed to get them to take it down since our site updates automatically every night,” Katie Curnutte said. “We’re usually successful. We work on all sides to make sure the source gets fixed.”
Still, most real estate agents don’t have time to monitor a half-dozen online resources daily.
“How many Web sites can you go through, and how often, to see if what they’ve got out there about you and your listing is even correct?” Ms. Covington said.
These Web sites also present community information such as median home sale prices and time on the market. Potential homebuyers can use this data to decide where they want to live.
Texas Association of Realtors chairman-elect Bill Jones said information such as this on real estate Web sites is often unreliable.
“It’s just not accurate at all, the way I describe it … a broken clock is right twice a day,” Jones said. “These guys are just throwing out numbers with very little consideration. They really have no attention at all paid to age, location, condition … they’re only going by very generalized, census type location and square foot numbers they pulled of other sales.”
Jones and other real estate professionals suggest going through a real estate agent instead, because they have access to the Multiple Listing Service, a more-tightly-controlled real estate database.
