We are selling our house in Maryland and we’ve had some problems with Zillow and Trulia. Or maybe they’re problems with our agent.
Zillow has several inaccuracies: wrong square footage, two stories instead of three, etc. And it’s using some photos our agent took and posted on her company’s site. When I saw how bad they were, I took some better ones, and she removed hers from her site and posted mine. But Zillow hasn’t put up the better ones. And they aren’t showing the latest asking price, which is $20,000 lower than their listing.
At Trulia, our data is correct, but our listing doesn’t come up on any searches for the neighborhood, street, or ZIP, unless you enter the complete street address. Needless to say, that doesn’t exactly help put our house in front of people who are looking to buy.
Zillow seems to have a process for correcting errors, but it won’t let me, as the owner, do it. It says the listing agent must make the changes. When we’ve asked our agent to correct it, she says she’ll try, but that they don’t always make the changes she asks for.
We’ve e-mailed Trulia, asking why the house doesn’t show up, but haven’t heard back yet. Our agent says she thinks you have to pay them to get in the search results.
She also generally downplays the importance of online sites like Zillow and Trulia, saying that she only ever gets serious buyers through other agents. But we found our new house through Trulia (which my wife was scouring obsessively), and we assume most people these days use the web sites, and then go to their agents with the listings they’re interested in.
Can you tell me whether it’s difficult for the listing agent to change a Zillow listing, and whether Trulia only shows listings for which they have been paid in their search results? Both seem unlikely to me.
Thanks.