Stop Showing Old Real Estate Data! It’s Time we put our Collective Foot Down and Demand Data Quality.
Recently I put my house on the market. Being a member of the Smarter Agent team, I was excited to see my listing show up in the Smarter Agent mobile app. My house went on the market at 2:19 PM on a Friday and was live in the Smarter Agent mobile app by the time I woke up on Saturday morning (to be precise, it was actually live in the app at 1am on Saturday morning). I was thrilled, I quickly emailed all of my friends and family my new listing right from within the app and told them to spread the word to help get this property sold! Then, out of curiosity, I checked to see where else my listing had been picked up and noticed that my listing was available on other real estate sites but the listing data was old/stale.
The data was a year old, from when I had initially put the house on the market. The old pictures were there, old pricing, the old square footage, not exactly what I want potential new home buyers viewing. What a way to burst my home seller bubble! My new listing information did eventually populate within these other sites, about a day later, but as we all know, whether you are a home buyer, home seller, real estate agent in the real estate world, every day/hour/minute/second counts.
A real estate data-quality study, “reviewed about 1.2 million listings from about 250 data sources during the third quarter and found about 120,000 inaccuracies in listings information. More than half (51 percent) of those inaccurate listings had errors in price, 41 percent had status errors, and 8 percent had errors in both price and status.” They also mentioned that they “found that about 69 percent of errors in online real estate listings information were directly related to third-party syndication of information by non-multiple listing service sources.” Smarter Agent receives data directly from the MLS therefore allowing for us to have the best possible real estate data out there.
With that in mind, I reached out to Dan White, our Data Integration Manager, and asked him his thoughts on the importance of data quality in real estate. “Data Quality in our industry is paramount; we as a mobile IDX company are trying to present our customers in the best light. This includes data being loaded in a timely and accurate fashion, following our MLS’s rules. This is where I think a lot of companies fall short. We deal with over 300 MLSs and we try to meet or exceed their expectations as well as our customers.”
In an industry where the quality of real estate data can make or break a sale, I recommend going with a company that can consistently stand by their data integrity and quality, Smarter Agent.
~ Sasha England, MLS Coordinator