If you are looking for a home and want to see every home that is on the market, you need to know that the national real estate listing sites do not have every available home listing. Not only are the sites missing active home listings, but some of the sites also include listings that have already sold or have outdated prices.
I just ran an experiment to see how many properties would come up if I ran a search for 3 bedroom properties in Creve Coeur, MO. Here are the results:
National Real Estate Sites:
Trulia – 88
Oodle – 71
Yahoo Real Estate - 55
AOL Real Estate – 24
Cyberhomes – 3
Homescape – 25
Point 2 Homes – 1
HomeGain – 6
CLR Search – 20
Zillow – unknown (impossible to just pull up Creve Coeur)
Realtor.com – unknown (impossible to just pull up Creve Coeur)
The MLS has 135 homes in the same search.
With the exception of Realtor.com, the rest of the national sites rely on agents, brokers and owners to submit ads for their home listings. Clearly everyone is not submitting ads to these national sites. Realtor.com, brokers and agent websites are the only sites that are allowed to use a direct MLS feed to show all MLS listed properties on their site.
Even though the MLS doesn’t include any of the homes that aren’t listed by an agent (FSBO properties), it does include all of the homes that are listed with an agent in which the listing broker agrees to compensate other brokers if they bring the buyer (the real purpose of the MLS). Since the vast majority of homes are listed with agents, the MLS has the most comprehensive list of available properties.
And, it doesn’t include ANY homes with outdated prices.
Check out my new MLS map based search. You’ll find every active St. Louis area home that is listed on the MLS.
10936 Manchester Road St. Louis, MO, 63122 USA
admin@archcityhomes.com • 314-677-6538
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Your listings show a total of one house for sale in the city of St. Louis…there are three on my street, on my block…Pestalozzi…where are they?
JO – Which search option did you use to do your search? When I chose the address/zip tab, and typed in Pestalozzi, I came up with 8 properties.
If you are looking on the map page, you need to zoom in to the area you are interested in. The map only shows icons on the top 100 priced properties, but zooming in to the specific area that you are interested in will get you all the homes.
The default map currently only shows 100 properties on it, but has a total of 16,968 in the mapped region.
The local MLS rules only allow 100 properties to come back on any search, so if your search criteria turns up more than 100 properties…it will only show the first 100. If you narrow your criteria a bit, then you’ll get everything.
Let me know if this fixes your problem in finding the homes. And thanks for checking out my search feature!!!