You’re shopping for a house and your dealbreakers are that it has to be at least 2500 square feet, not be in an HOA, and feed into a specific school. Zillow has filters for all of those things, so you’re good to go, right? Consumer-facing third-party sites like Zillow (or Redfin, or realtor.com, etc.) are a great tool for buyers to launch their search, but it’s worth knowing where their limitations lie and when it’s best to double-check data or ask your buyer agent. Data is often incorrect, and that could cause you to at best waste some time and at worst buy the wrong house. Due diligence is always on the buyer, so it’s pretty important to not take every data point you see in a listing as gospel. This isn’t always the fault of these sites. In fact, it’s usually not their fault.
Most of the data you see in a home’s listing was originally input by the listing agent for that home, into whichever local Multiple Listing Service that agent is a member of. There are currently over 500 MLS’s in the US. The third-party search sites receive a feed from each MLS, and then have to fit all of the fields coming at them from all of the different senders into their one-size-fits-all box. RMLS, which is the MLS for the Portland area, has over 100 data fields for a listing. Any software engineer knows what an effort it can be to correctly interpret and assign all of these disparate data formats so they show up perfectly on the consumer end, and to do it instantly.
On top of that, note what I said in the first sentence in the preceding paragraph. Listing agents enter the data. Listing agents are humans, and humans make mistakes. Some listing agents are, charitably, more human than others. The majority of the errors you’ll find in a listing were caused by good old-fashioned human error.
So what are the most common ones to look out for?
Numbers 1, 2 and 3: schools. When a listing agent is building out the listing, they enter the schools that the home is assigned to. Fairly often, they get them wrong. Here’s how I imagine it happens: the listing agent is sitting down with their seller clients, and asks where their kids went to school. The sellers say they went to Ridgemont High, so the listing agent plunks that into the listing. The problem is that in the 30 years since the sellers’ kids were in high school, the school boundaries have been redrawn, or maybe the school burned down. The listing agent doesn’t verify, and the data ends up incorrect.
Speaking of verification, it’s comically easy to do these days. Pretty much any school district has a website where you can type in an address and it will tell you which three schools the home is zoned for. In addition, RMLS has an overlay map that can be used to show school boundaries. The amount of real estate agents who don’t seem to know this is pretty incredible. One example I just pulled up: in the past year, 52 homes in our area have been listed or sold whose listings show that they feed into Cedar Park Middle School and Sunset High. The problem? Cedar Park doesn’t feed into Sunset and hasn’t for a while, since they opened a new middle school in the area. Ten years ago.
The third-party sites know this is a problem so if you search by school on their sites, you get it in map form rather than a search based on the agent-input data. Zillow also has a nicely passive-aggressive way of calling out the bad data:
Square Footage. There are different ways a listing agent can source the square footage for a listing but generally it’s one of these:
- Whatever the county thinks it is.
- Whatever was on the listing the last time the house was sold.
- Actual measurements provided by a qualified service.
About 2/3 of the time it’ll be #1, and it’s not always going to be correct. A bunch will be #2, which the RMLS tells us not to do because who knows if it was correct last time. The most accurate will generally be #3, but even those have variance.
If the actual square footage is important to you, the best thing to do is hire a measurement company for a couple hundred bucks to come out and measure it. There may be no real upside in this though. If the county’s tax assessor thinks the square footage is smaller than it actually is…well, do they really need to be corrected? If they think it’s bigger, then maybe you’ve got some useful info.
The good news is that RMLS requires us agents to enter where we got the square footage from, and tax records (with the county’s number, which could be different than what the agent entered) will be part of every listing. You won’t find this info on Zillow, but any RMLS member has access and can share the info with you.
HOA. Helpful hint: if you’re on Zillow and want to know whether a house is in an HOA or not, keep scrolling down. The header up top can be misleading when there’s no dollar amount in the HOA box. This house is not in an HOA:
This one is:
Don’t they both look like they’re non-HOA?
To get the real answer, you have to scroll down a while and hit “show more” to find this section:
The problem is partially due to agent input and partially due to how Zillow displays things. RMLS has a field that requires a “yes” or “no” to whether it’s in an HOA, and another field where you enter the dues. For the house above that’s in an HOA, the “yes” was checked but the dues field was left empty, or at zero. Zillow doesn’t quite know what to do with that, so it shows up like it does above.
Right now, there are 35 active listings in the area that are in an HOA but don’t have the dollar amount specified, so on Zillow, at first glance, they’re going to look like they’re not in an HOA. If you really need to know, scroll down and hit that “show more” button.
I could make this a very long post (remember, there are over 100 agent-input fields on a listing), but this is already too long. The important takeaway is that anything that matters to you should be verified– there is always a way to verify– and a good buyer agent will already have a decent spidey-sense for data that looks hinky. When I’m working with a buyer client, the bare minimum I’m doing is saving time for that person. On the other end, I’m potentially keeping them from buying a house that will have a nasty surprise after closing. This is how we avoid lawsuits, people.
