With Millions of Listings, Zillow Is the Near-Perfect Home Search Tool—But Will You Find Your Forever Home?
Hello, my friend, hello again; today we come together to talk about With Millions of Listings, Zillow Is the Near-Perfect Home Search Tool—But Will You Find Your Forever Home? and hope the blog can help you.
Zillow has pages and pages of assistance for home buyers, sellers, and renters on top of millions of listings. But what does the home renting, buying, and selling process really look like?
Shopping for a new home used to be a process dependent almost entirely on finding a good real estate agent or scanning the real estate ads in the Sunday paper. Renters had it even worse: Many real estate agents didn’t handle rentals, so relying on neighborhood-based newsprint magazines and classifieds requiring phone calls and messages just to get a peek inside was the norm. Shopping for a place to live got a little easier once the internet allowed shoppers to browse the listings at different real estate agents’ websites (slowly and frustratingly over a dial-up connection) and some rental-only websites, and the process really broke open when the closely guarded Multiple Listing Service (MLS) became available to search. Once that happened, a number of companies saw the opportunity to build fairly comprehensive search engines incorporating MLS listings and mining data from local tax assessors to provide comps and neighborhood assessments for home shoppers to skim through while they were deciding where they might like to live. Zillow was one of those sites.
As one of the leaders of the online real estate industry, Zillow is available both online and via mobile app, and its reach into the real estate market is incomparable. The depth of the data available (and the formats in which the data can be viewed) is extensive, and there are services available through Zillow for nearly every aspect of the home buying, home renting, or home selling process. Most customers will still want to find a real estate agent to work with, but they’ll be able to provide plenty of examples of the homes they like and don’t like and identify neighborhoods they’d like to consider up front, saving time and effort and resulting in a more rewarding (and hopefully swift) process of finding (or selling) a home.
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At a Glance
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