David Barr's Sarasota and Venice Real Estate Blog

Zillow is in legal trouble (again), this time with the federal government for alleged violations of anti-kickback and deceptive practices rules.  In short, it's a violation of RESPA, the Real Estate Settlement Protection Act, for an entity to pay for real estate referrals, such as a lender paying for advertising for a Realtor. Buyer beware: Whenever you see a Zillow Premier Agent promoting a lender, that lender is helping pay for that agent's marketing on Zillow.  When you hire a Realtor to market your home for sale, you need someone can market themselves first.  Gary Keller of Keller Williams once said "Zillow is lazy marketing for agents".   Zillow is an unethical company which always seems to be in litigation for misuse of data or misleading business practices.  Avoid Zillow when looking for a property because of bad data, and when choosing an agent who can't market themselves.

I did a quick comparison today at 12:20 pm as to the total number of single family homes for sale in Venice FL, on both the MLS and on Zillow.  Here are the screen shots of the results: MLS shows 379 active single family homes for sale with a Venice FL address. Zillow's website shows 876 "houses" for sale in Venice FL. This is a wildly inaccurate number from Zillow, and the discrepancy is far too large to account for FSBO listings that aren't included in the MLS.  Zillow is notorious for leaving old and sold listings on its site, in a single minded focus on "having the most listings" in their failing attempt to compete with Realtor.com. The "most listings" doesn't translate to an accurate website with properties you can actually buy. #Localisbetter . Zillow is in business to sell advertising, not sell real estate.  Learn more about Zillow's inaccurate data and why they do this on my website .

I was doing some market intelligence today and I noticed something quite interesting. The major real estate portals such as Zillow/Trulia, Redfin, Movoto, etc., are including what are supposed to look like an active inventory count of available properties for the search term queried.  It seems one of our competitors has picked up on this trend. Today's search results for "Venice Island FL real estate" showing incorrect inventory on competitor websites Both of these search results are displaying incorrect inventory levels for the search terms used.  Since "Venice Island" is a geographic area more than a neighborhood, I use the mapping feature available in our MLS to display properties there for sale on my website .  Today there are 93 single family homes, condos, townhomes, and villas for sale in that area, not 127. As far as Zillow's link, it wasn't even accurate based on the keywords used.  For Venice FL, there are not 977 homes for sale. ...

I was reading today about Zillow acquiring DotLoop. I had not heard of DotLoop. Apparently it's a competitor to Docusign. And there's a lot of competitors to Docusign.  But I digress. The blog I was reading posted this link to a YouTube video about this acquisition:   https://youtu.be/FTvEw0toTTc I believe this is Zillow's last gasp. Zillow's end game is to change how real estate is transacted.  They have been pursuing a strategy of acquiring electronic signature companies, online rental companies, and IDX data (and stealing it to display on Zillow), all in an effort to begin the creation of a new online experience.  Zillow wants an end-run around Realtors, and appeal long term to millenials, who live their lives through apps. They can't win the accuracy battle with Realtor.com. They can't win the PR battle they face against an army of Realtors who are spreading the word about Zillow's unethical and misleading business practices. They are n...

Inman News (one of the real estate industry's leading news providers) posted a story online about another brokerage cutting off their feed of listings to Zillow's website. Northwood Realty in Pennsylvania has announced they have stopped syndication of their company's residential listings to Zillow.  Northwood Realty has more than 1000 agents that serve the metro Pittsburgh area. "While we embace technology and promote it as a tool fo rour clients, it has become apparent that the level of inaccuracy on Zillow's website is misleading, inaccurate, and outdated," CEO and President Tom Hosak wrote in an email to agents. I have been saying for a long time that Zillow is a detriment to real estate consumers, and this decision by a large brokerage is further proof of that. Read the entire Inman article here . Read more about how Zillow does business on my website:  http://www.davidbarrhomes.com/#!debunking-zillow-sarasota/cftb