What National Home Search sites don't want you to know

When you use national search engines like Zillow, Trulia or Realtor, what you don’t know can be a problem. Here are some little known things about home searches. 

You are the commodity 

The big national sites generally don’t make money selling homes...they make money selling your info. Your data is the main product they sell to make income. And they sell it often. 

It may be sold 

With hundreds of thousands of houses listed at any one time nationally, it’s easy for a transaction to get missed. A house can appear to be “for sale” on a site, but was sold or withdrawn days or months previously. 

That’s not the right agent

The “featured agent” slot next to a listing goes to an agent who pays to be there. So the face you see often has no connection to a particular listing. So think you are reaching out to the listing agent, but they just sold your info to that agent, and very likely a few more. 

Inaccurate Data 

With tens of thousands of third party data providers, things go wrong and it’s easy for a home to get lost or corrupted and not display correctly. As well, some local brokerages refuse to allow the big national sites to have their listings...so you’ll never see all the homes for sale on their sites. 

Not unbiased sources 

Zillow bought Trulia in 2015 as another place to get your info. As well, they’ve started buying and selling houses in the 919, so they compete with local firms instead of serving you. 

Realtor.com isn’t owned by Realtors

You’d think with a trademarked name like “Realtor,” it would be owned by the realtor association. But, that domain name was sold years ago and the current owner’s parent company is News Corp, which owns many news channels. 

If you want fast, safe and accurate home search, check out 919 Realty Group. We never sell your data to anyone.