Name:   John C - Subject:   possibilities within budget on lake martin... Date:   1/29/2018 6:01:18 PM (updated 1/29/2018 11:24:14 PM)

First, you have to understand that ZTR (Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com) and sites like them, are merely aggregators. That is, they simply gather info from the hundreds of MLSs around the country to populate pages on their website. They are very careful to, in the fine print at the bottom of each page, claim no accuracy whatsoever and squarely put the onus of accuracy on the MLSs from which they get the data. 

Secondly, their goal is to dominate google searches by consumers. For that, you need lots of pages. You need info. And you need people clicking on your site so that google can think they are helpful. The more pages they have, the more people click. The more people click, the higher that google puts them in search results, assuming that the pages are helpful. The higher the pages are in search results, the more people click. and on, and on, and on. Yes, it's a circular calculation.

Thirdly, where do they get their money? Aggregators get 99.9% of their money from agents - telling them that they have to advertise on their site in order to get leads. Basically they call and email and pressure agents to advertise so that they can be featured to be the "awesome agent" in that area, which has nothting to do with actual performance or feedback and everything to do with how much money you spend to advertise with them. So get this- if I have a listing in the local lake mls - and it gets uploaded to ZTR - If I am not in the top awesome agent list, my contact info is not on the listing on ZTR. You have to look really really hard at the fine print to figure out who is really the listing agent. 

To answer your question, most of the time the homes are not for sale and they're giving you an "estimate" on the price. But if it is really listed, the way to tell is to scroll down on the bottom and see if it says something like "info provided by X realty." Then that means it's for sale and there is a marginal chance that the price is right. I say marginal because usually it takes a really long time for any price changes etc to go through and make it to ZTR. 

Another common question- if the Lake Martin MLS doesn't upload to ZTR, then how are some lake martin listing showing up there? Answer- some local companies that are national franchises have collective agreements with ZTR to upload MLS data. So it's not coming from the MLS, it's coming from the local lake martin franchise, up to their corporate database, then up to ZTR. 

I don't participate (right now) in sites like ZTR because I don't see the sense in providing them the most valuable thing in real estate (listing info) for free, and then allowing them to charge me a ransom for the privelege to outbid other agents to advertise on the data that I gave them for free. Maybe one day ZTR will contribute to the process, will give actual value to consumers. Then I will hop on. But now it doesn't and I don't.