Tuesday, February 26 2013
You are doing some serious house-hunting.
You’ve been Googling ‘newest local listings’, but when you click on the most popular sites, somehow the ‘newest local listings’ are the same ones you’ve seen before. Worse, some of them turn out to have been sold! Or the price was wrong! Or the agent isn’t even the agent anymore!
What is going on? Doesn’t Google (or Bing, or Yahoo!) promise to show you sites with the newest listings in Evansville? How can the most popular sites (at the top of their results page: Zillow, Realty.com, Trulia) be showing ‘newest listings’ that were sold last month? Or contact numbers that take you to an answering machine that never calls back?
The answer is not mysterious, but it can take a while to catch on. The top of the search engine results pages show the biggest national real estate sites because they target the national audience (and pay huge amounts to the search engines!). Hundreds of thousands of house-hunters click on them all the time because everyone in the country sees them first.
The disappointment comes because of the near impossibility of their keeping current in every locality in the U.S. They can’t keep up with the avalanche of changes: changes in the asking price; changes in the listing agent; changes in availability. That becomes obvious when your contacts return a ‘home under contract,’ or ‘property sold,’ or – infuriatingly -- silence.
The good news is that the solution is just a couple of lines lower on those Bing or Google search results. Serious buyers do figure it out eventually, and look down the search engine listings to find a web address that looks more like it connects with a local real estate brokerage. That leads to listings overseen by local businesspeople who deal every day with the homes their pages show. When they change, local agents know it first.
Even better for you, you’re already here – a click away from what you are looking for – and just one click more from my invitation to visit the newest listings in Evansville! You can search all area listings here: http://thetrentiniteam.com/property_search Comments:
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