Testing some of the top home-search sites
If Americans have come to rely on the Internet to search for houses -- and last year, the National Assn. of Realtors says, 84% of all buyers did -- where should one start?
The Web is awash in sites that promise to help focus a home search, with an extraordinary range of tools.
We asked three firms that measure Internet traffic to list the most-visited real estate websites in the country, excluded a few that weren’t relevant to our search and came up with a top 10 list of “for-sale” sites. Then we took each site for a test drive, using a hypothetical search for home listings.
Over two days in June, we searched each site for three-bedroom, single-family homes on the market in Santa Monica. The number of homes for sale that the sites found ranged from 49 to 168.
Some of the sites wowed us with maps, data and detailed listings and let us tailor our searches umpteen ways. Others seemed less focused on finding a home than on putting us into the hands of a real estate agent or mortgage broker. Some buried useful tools behind “advanced search” links.
Here, in an admittedly subjective presentation, is what we found at the sites we sampled, ranked according to search results, from the most houses found to the fewest:
Zillow.com: The wildly popular home-valuation site also offers for-sale listings, and it turned up 168 homes with three or more bedrooms, though individual listings were slim on details. The site is loaded with gadgetry, such as mapping the listed homes via Microsoft Virtual Earth; the maps also link smoothly to homes for sale nearby. Its voyeuristic “Make Me Move” function allows people who don’t have their homes on the market to nonetheless specify a minimum offer that might get them to change their minds.
Mortgage shopping? Zillow allows users to anonymously enter personal information to shop for rates and terms and claims the anonymity has drawn a strong response from consumers. Zillow’s Real Estate Guide is a wiki feature (meaning readers can edit it) about various aspects of the real estate market.
HomeGain.com: The “about” section on the site makes no secret of its dedicated function as a lead generator -- that is, putting real estate agents in contact with consumers. (Full disclosure: HomeGain is a unit of Classified Ventures, a joint venture of several newspaper companies, including Tribune Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times.)
Our tour through HomeGain turned into a puzzling experience. To get anywhere on this site, you must register your name, phone and e-mail address, and HomeGain then connects you to the site of an affiliated real estate agent. On the first day of our HomeGain house hunt, we checked the box for a minimum of three bedrooms and turned up 142 listings. However, these turned out to be all types of properties, including condos. When we narrowed the selection to single-family homes, the site told us “none of the listings meet your criteria.”
We went back to HomeGain the next day and tried to look again. But this time -- and in numerous attempts thereafter -- we didn’t get the link to the Santa Monica real estate agent at all. Instead, we turned up 48 homes -- all of them foreclosure listings through RealtyTrac, an online company that specializes in foreclosure data.
What happened to our original 142 homes? A spokesman for HomeGain said we got the RealtyTrac version because of the way HomeGain contracts with agents. Individual agents pay to have their listings pop up on HomeGain a certain number of times. When we made our return visit, that agent no longer was participating, said company spokeswoman Jessica Gopalakrishnan.
“We cover about 80% of the areas in the United States, but right now, that area doesn’t appear to be covered,” and so our specific search defaulted to the RealtyTrac data, she said.
She suggested that, in such cases, typing in criteria for a suburb near Santa Monica could connect to an agent whose site could deliver the desired listings.
ZipRealty.com: A search of this site turned up 126 listings of three bedrooms or more.
But what we got on Zip was less a “listing” than a spartan list: Each property garnered one line, specifying the number of bedrooms and baths, lot size, square footage, price and price reduction, if any, and whether pictures were available. If you want to see more -- photos, neighborhood information etc. -- you must register by supplying a name, phone and e-mail. The site uses Microsoft Virtual Earth to map the location of each listing.
The company says it will announce a number of new mapping and foreclosure-data features in the coming week.
RealEstate.Yahoo.com: The Yahoo search engine’s real estate arm found 107 properties with three-plus bedrooms. The site allows you to map gas stations, schools and other local amenities and comparable recent home sales, plugging in records from Zillow.com.
It profiles local schools, throwing in parent comments from another site, GreatSchools.net; demographic information on Santa Monica contained the predictable household income data etc. but also included political party affiliations, so you can gauge the likelihood of sparring with your neighbors come November.
Realtor.com: This website turned up 103 properties in the three-or-more-bedrooms category and offered many specifics, including address, room features etc. Move Inc., which runs Realtor.com for the National Assn. of Realtors, has added a load of tools in the last year: The Market Conditions feature broke Santa Monica down into neighborhoods and offered local data and commentary from area real estate agents, some of whom were quite specific about what’s happening in their marketplace; the Find a Neighborhood button provided a long menu of demographic, economic and school data.
A separate search device may help the uncertain buyer narrow down which towns and neighborhoods might be a good fit. The number of photos per house varies greatly, depending on the brokerage that supplies the data.
RealEstate.msn.com: If the listings look familiar, it’s because the Microsoft site links you directly to Realtor.com to look for existing homes, so we ended up with its aforementioned 103 properties. (It also sends you to RealtyTrac for foreclosures and to Move.com for new homes and rentals.)
Want neighborhood demographics? You’ll be whisked to Yahoo.com. In terms of unique content, RealEstate.msn.com has an aggregation of real estate news and information, though much of the latter comes from BankRate.com.
ReMax.com: The nationwide listings site of Re/Max International claims to have “millions” of listings, though it includes for-sale properties from other brokerages. It turned up 91 candidate homes for us. The site has numerous ways to tailor a search, such as specifying a subdivision, lot size, open houses etc. The quantity of information one could glean about each house without actually contacting a real estate agent was minimal, however. Typically, there were lots of pictures per property, and the site had links to local demographic and school data.
Trulia.com: This is arguably the most feature-rich site of the dozen here, found 77 single-family homes with three bedrooms; an additional 17 showed up when we asked for four. The site displays photos of the homes via Google Street Maps, alongside snapshots and links for half a dozen homes it regards as similar properties for sale, plus six recently sold comparable ones.
It also graphs how a home’s price compares with similar for-sale and recently sold properties, as well as Santa Monica homes in general. Its “heat maps” generalize trends in recent asking prices in Santa Monica neighborhoods.
Trulia helpfully groups many of its tools on one page instead of linking to other pages of school data, price trends categorized in several ways, number of sales and recent sales activity in various neighborhoods.
ColdwellBanker.com: Coldwell Banker wants you to see its listings before any other brokerage’s, so that’s all you get on an initial query at its site -- in this case, 29 homes with three or more bedrooms. But if you open one of the listings, you can click on a link to CaliforniaMoves.com, which offers a slew of listings from area brokers; this link turned up 96. Most listings come with lots of photos. Other data -- income, demographics etc. -- take a little surfing to locate, but there’s a lot of local information here. An interactive map pinpoints other listings nearby.
RealEstate.aol.com: America Online’s real estate channel turned up 49 listings in a search for three or more bedrooms; these included foreclosure, new construction and for-sale-by-owner properties. MapQuest pinpointed their locations. A separate search feature broke down the town by ZIP Code, with demographic and home-sales data for each. Each listing has headings for square footage, number of bathrooms, local schools etc., though on many individual listings, those spots were blank. Finding out more about listed foreclosure properties requires entering personal information to get a free trial subscription to its Bargain Homes Network.
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Next week: Some other real estate websites worth noting.
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About our search
The Internet-data firms that supplied our “top sites” lists -- Hitwise, ComScore Media Metrix and Nielsen Online -- don’t define “real estate” in the same way, so to come up with a list of sites for our search, we eliminated foreclosures-only sites and those that don’t have for-sale listings. ComScore regards the numerous domains within Move.com as one, but we looked only at its Realtor.com, which has existing-homes listings.
On many sites, one cannot just search for three bedrooms -- most will search for three or more bedrooms at a time, which may turn up four-, five- and six-bedroom homes, thus skewing the results. So, in fairness, for the sites that had a category for three bedrooms only, we also searched at the next highest bedroom level.
And, granted, searching these sites over two days instead of one might not yield 100% comparable numerical results, but it does reduce the likelihood of the searcher’s brain going completely numb.
-- Mary Umberger
