Posted on 07/03/2025 9:15:55 AM PDT by where's_the_Outrage?
The real-estate industry is battling it out over control of for-sale listings, and home sellers in particular could get hurt.
Two major lawsuits filed over the last two weeks against the real-estate platform Zillow and the National Association of Realtors, an industry group, seek to answer the question of who controls home listings in America.
The lawsuits, filed by two real-estate companies, challenge the status quo of how for-sale listings are seen by millions of users on the internet. The plaintiffs want to keep some listings private and only accessible to those who hire certain brokers.
Under the current policy, which is essentially enforced by real-estate platforms, buyers can see almost all U.S. homes for sale online within 24 hours of the properties being publicly marketed as for sale. Because all public for-sale listings are fed to real-estate platforms, home sellers can get the highest level of exposure and the highest price possible.......
In the first lawsuit, the real-estate brokerage Compass accused Zillow of being anticompetitive with its new rule banning any home listings from the platform that appear on any other service for more than 24 hours before going up on Zillow. Critics have dubbed the rule, which went into effect Monday, the “Zillow ban.”
Compass has argued that it should be able to offer listings marketed exclusively via its own platform without having them appear on Zillow. Zillow, for its part, has said that “consumers deserve fair access to listings without having to get access behind a velvet rope controlled by any one company.”
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Compass agent sold my house in may. It was listed with KW. When i sold real estate, we were required, at the time to send the listing to the local board of realtors for inclusion in what was then the book. We would sometimes hold the listing to be sure everyone in house got a chance to see the house first. I guess this is like that.
I’m 71. I’m starting to feel like a man out of my time because of the complications involved in doing anything. That’s why my retirement plan was not to have a lot of money, but to own everything I need, free and clear. And that’s where I am.
We even have four cars that are getting long in the tooth, but I keep them running just fine. But I bring all this up because one of the things that was HUGE for me is to get our taxable income low enough that we pay no income tax. And we did it! Doing my taxes takes about 20 minutes. It’s all about low stress.
I feel as if I’m living in the 19th century, but with all the modern conveniences of the 21st. And living in the sticks now, things like Amazon are huge for us. My life is about as complicated as it was when I was a kid.
contract says “as-is, inspection waved” They of course can back out but there is no way they can back out and get their ernest money back. They are coming from California. Paying cash with the proceeds from the house out there. Not sure if it’s from an insurance company or just the sale of the home. but the realitor told me he actually has a list of people waiting on homes like mine (4 bed, 3 bath anchorage, large pole barn end of the road middle of no where.. but close to a major highway. 1 mile is close enough but far enough you can’t hear it) The only catches are from the state. The well has to pass a water test (it just did last fall, we do one anually just to be safe. it’s 20 bucks.) and the septic has to be compliant and working (it is, but we need an offical sign off on it)
So basically they get what it is. The water heater started leaking this morning so technically, that is their problem but since we are going to live in it for the next 4 weeks or so I am going to replace it. With the cheapest one from home depot of course lol
also thankfully 2 homes kinda close (in the same zipcode) just sold for way more than we thought ours was worth, rasing the value of ours quiet a bit. Both had less land, smaller homes, no out building and fewer bedrooms, also we have the best view as we are on top of the highest hill for 10 miles.
So ours is ringing the bell over what those sold for. our goal was to walk away with no debt. (and no home. but.. ya thats a future me problem right? we do have a year round cabin in the family we will live in until the businesses are sold/closed) if this deal goes through we will be leaving MN with 200K in the bank plus what ever we sell the businesses for.
When I was flipping, I created a spreadsheet to calculate ARV (After Repair Value) which went deep into determining what it “should” sell for based off of comp sales. The trickiest part of comps is determining which were true comps. When I was in the Seattle area, you could have 2 houses, same age, same builder, same floorplan, same basic condition, but be $300K different because one had a view and the other did not. Zillow could never pick up on that.
When you read the fine print on Zillow, they pretty much admit their estimates are crap. “There is an 80% chance that the actual sale price will be within +/*20% of the Estimate”. Another way of saying the same thing is that there is a 20% chance that the actual sale price will be greater than 20% +/- of the Actual Sale Price. Zillow picks comps based on proximity with matching or similar flags (number of beds, baths, square footage, etc). My spreadsheet could use ANY other sale of a like unit (ie, SFR, Condo, etc) as a comp, because I knew what the value of an additional bedroom, or bathroom was. I had a lot of people that wanted to buy my spreadsheet, but I never sold it.
We moved from a white hot market and went 30 minutes west to a dead market. No mortgage. I retired, got bored, went back to work and going out again. Sometimes I think retirement is the worst job I ever had.
It was correct on my realtors listing, but I cannot say regarding MLS since the error was noticed by a family member on Zillow only. I do know MLS helped handle the issue with Zillow so I have to assume it was wrong in both places.
I got misinformation off because I have an excellent realtor who aggressively went after the issue until it was corrected.
That makes sense since Zillow is merely an aggregator.
Many years ago, I worked as a software developer for a real estate marketing company where I developed software to import listings from various MLSs into our database to be displayed our agent/broker clients' web sites.
Basically, our package was similar to Zillow in that we only imported the MLS data/photos.
I have a programming background so that helps me understand where the problem likely lies. My land adjoins national forest. There is no physical address for it or the 4 other properties below it. On tax receipts all have the address of 0 “xxxx” road, but different parcel numbers. If the listing doesn’t also reflect the correct parcel on a given road then it must have simply pulled the most recent sale. Not sure of another way this would have occurred.
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