The Real Estate Labyrinth
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently had a nice piece on the challenges that consumers still face when hunting for a house online. There’s lots of information and lots of websites, but the information that you really want may be hidden or in many cases not yet available online.
“A lot of information is hard to come by, such as lot size, (house) layout and square footage. I have to drive by a place to find out my truck won’t fit in the driveway and there’s no way I can do anything with the boat except put it diagonally across the front yard.”
This highlights one buyer’s struggles to find just the right place. Of particular note to this blog’s readers is that they also ended up going with a flat fee MLS broker that offered substantial rebates for buyers as well. The other key point that was raised was the additional information that is exclusively available to realtors in the MLS.
“Joy Busse was astounded at how much more property detail MLS supplies brokers than the general public.”
If this more detailed MLS information remains in the proprietary domain of Realtor-only access, then the real estate profession may well ensure that it continues to thrive for many years to come.
May 14th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
A nice article overall from MJS. However, I think that much of the information is available … you just have to know where to look. Not sure about other areas of the country … but I can find out almost as much information about the house as the realtor has through a well crafted local realtor site allowing MLS access here … and the rest I can fill in from our local government website (which displays square footage and tax information, for example). You could check your boat parking through satellite images (which will only get better). The only thing I can’t find is whether the listing is still active or contingent.
May 24th, 2006 at 10:31 am
Realtors do appear to be holding onto some of their cards today. But less than before, and less in the future. Consumers are becoming more savvy at digging up information on homes, but it is still tough to find home histories in many markets. The Pacific Northwest being the biggest exception.