Property ManagementStudy Shows Listing Claims Are Inflated
Clareity Consulting, the premier MLS consulting firm, has completed its
Clareity Special Report, a study which followed the "Real Estate
Internet Advertising Shoot-Out" held in Washington, D.C.
In January 1999, Gregg Larson, the creator of the Clareity Shoot-Out, led a
team of web researchers that performed a manual property listing "audit" of
four of the largest real estate advertising sites on the Internet, including
RealSelect"s REALTOR.COM, Moore Data"s Cyberhomes, HomeSeekers.com, and Microsoft"s HomeAdvisor, which yielded some surprising results.
According to Larson, the goal of this study was to monitor the progress made
by the leading listing aggregators since last April and independently verify
the number of listings that can be found by a consumer on the public web site.
Until now, to the best of anyone"s knowledge, no outside professional has ever
attempted to count the number of listings on the leading property advertising sites.
Clareity"s method involved manually searching the listing sites in every
state, city, and neighborhood possible, using as wide a search as possible,
recording the number of search results and adding those numbers to reach a
total for each site. To ensure the accuracy of the findings, two research
groups worked independently.
Here are Clareity"s findings:
Web Site
Number of Listings Claimed 1
Number of Listings Found 2
Count Provided by Company 3
Realtor.com
1,300,000
1,202,677
1,200,000
CyberHomes*
650,000
335,847
360,129
Homeseekers**
681,009
Not published
Not published
HomeAdvisor***
500,000
186,873
"higher than that"
1 Number of Listings Claimed on Site or in Recent Press Releases.
2 Number of Listings Clareity Was Able to Find on the Primary Public Site.
3 Listing Count Provided by Company to Clareity.
* CyberHomes links out to over two hundred thousand listings, including many
listings in Canada, but these listings were not included since they are not on
the CyberHomes site and they are not branded with a CyberHomes view.
** HomeSeekers.com disagreed with Clareity’s research results and provided a private SQL tool for direct access to the database. Using this tool, Clareity found more listings than we could using the public access method. At the request of HomeSeekers.com we are not publishing the results of our findings.
*** HomeAdvisor has claimed over 500,000 listings are under contract, but
has not published a figure for the number of listings actually online.
Important Notes: All the leading sites were affected by lower than average
listing counts in January 1999 due to two factors: 1) seasonal fluctuations,
and 2) the strong real estate market in many areas of the country that has
depleted listing inventories. For example, MLSNI (Chicagoland) has often had
over 50,000 active residential listings in the past two years but currently
sends only 40,000 active residential listings to the listing aggregators.
Clareity invited the listing sites to protest the numbers
discovered by the study. The managers of the sites generally explained away the
discrepancies as either market fluctuations, "pending" MLS agreements, or both.
Only Homeseekers and HomeAdvisor disputed the findings for their sites as being
significantly lower that their actual count.
By far the least discrepancy between advertised listings and actual listings was
Realtor.com at 8 percent. Perry Morton, Vice President of Content for RealSelect,
confirmed Clareity’s research results for Realtor.com.
He said, "The current strong market and winter fluctuations accounts for the 8% variance
in our 1.3 million listings as of November 30th."
CyberHomes president John Mosey explained that their claim of 650,000 properties
is "the average annual inventory of the content partners under contract", not all of which
are currently represented on the site.
"Rather than concentrating on numbers, we are going to concentrate on the
quality of the consumer experience. That"s the metric that counts, if what
you"re trying to do is to get buyers and sellers to use your service," Mosey
was quoted as saying.
John Giaimo, president of HomeSeekers.com explained listing discrepancies
as fluctuating listings. "We haven’t changed our published number more than
10% in six months, even though we’re adding 2 to 4 MLSs a week, because
inventories are dropping."
HomeSeekers.com maintains thousands of listings in their database which are
published under private label web sites for their broker clients. An example
of this is the RE/MAX of Texas site, www.remax-texas.com. This private label, RE/MAX branded view, shows only RE/MAX listings and many of these listings
would not have been found in a search of the HomeSeekers.com site. We also
found contingent, pending, withdrawn and sold residential listings in the
database, as well as some commercial properties that would not be found by a
consumer visiting this site.
Giaimo concluded, "There’s no question that Realtor.com has the most eggs
in their basket, but at the end of the day, HomeSeekers will be dead even with
RealSelect."
As the newest kid on the block, HomeAdvisor has only been on-line for six
months, and although the company has been very public in its announcements of
listing partners, it played close to the vest on actual numbers of listings. Scott Smith
and Ian Morris of HomeAdvisor, while disputing Clareity"s estimate as low, would not divulge
how many listings they actually have online at this time.
Explains Larson, "We tried very hard to be fair and accurate in this study.
Our results show the number of active residential properties that we were able
to find on the leading real estate sites. We gave the management of each site
the opportunity to "show us the listings" if they didn’t like the way we
counted or the number we arrived at. Some sites cooperated more than others
did to help verify that our methodology and results were indeed very accurate
for their sites. However, we can’t be certain that we found every listing on
every site. It is also important to note that the listing count varies daily on
each site and some sites are growing more rapidly than others are. We do not
represent or guarantee the results of this study are 100% accurate, but we
believe our methodology was sound and did not favor any one site."
For a full copy of the report, see Clareity Consulting.
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