David Barr's Sarasota and Venice Real Estate Blog

I've been following this "Trulia real estate expert" on Fox and Friends for a few weeks.  Today he showed up again today with his best deals segment. I noticed a couple of changes in his segment since I have started monitoring him on this program.  Today, the prices of the properties he profiled were displayed on screen for milliseconds, presumably to make the listings harder to trace back on Realtor.com.   Despite my previous challenge to him and to Trulia, they display no MLS numbers for potential buyers to find the homes Corbett profiles online. I also noticed he threw in a home in Sarasota (my primary market area) with no price displayed except for the anchor saying it verbally.  Below is what he profiled: 1) Atlanta   $300,000  3/3 red   2 story   2700 sq ft colonial  corner lot pre-wired for electronics: According to Realtor.com, this home is currently for sale. 2) Sarasota FL  3/2  1900 sq ft  stone...

I couldn't update Corbett's track record of his Friday Fox and Friends appearance but here's the gist. He profiled three homes.  When I searched for active listings on Realtor.com based on city, exact price, and bedrooms and baths, two of the three he profiled were not available.  One city, I believe it was Columbia, SC, had "zero" homes for sale matching the Corbett's criteria. This makes 5 out of 6 homes not available for sale that were profiled on Fox and Friends.  Misleading? Fact:  Zillow and Trulia do not have full access to MLS data.   On average they have 78% of the number of listings on Realtor.com.  Even worse, up to 17% of Zillow and Trulia listings are scraped from tax records to boost their listing count, or are old or expired listings they don't take off their site. Study from Inman News: http://www.inman.com/2013/03/06/accuracy-zillow-trulia-listing-data-under-fire-again/#.U2AqIvldWlI Trulia and Zillow will do anything to get vi...

Follow up to my blog post and Tweets about Corbett highlighting homes not for sale on Fox and Friends: I got a call from a Trulia representative around 7am PST.  I guess I hit a nerve. I stand by my assertions. The three homes he highlighted are not for sale on Realtor.com  He provides no MLS numbers and he provides no listing Realtor information. Trulia offered to send me and email with the MLS numbers.  I challenged them to rebut me on Twitter. Crickets.  I'm sure Trulia is now in the process of restricting my access to their website as Zillow has.  The Ministry of Real Estate Propaganda marches on. Stay tuned.  I'm sure Fox News doesn't want real estate misinformation on their air.