The news this week is mixed. Some good, some not so much. Some ups, some downs.

So, as in mixed nuts where you have to take the peanuts along with the cashews, and mixed drinks where soda uses up perfectly good space that could be occupied by scotch, we must accept this mixed news for what it is -  mixed.

The numbers are:

• Total Listings  -  2850 (up 1.1% from last week)
• Avg List Price -  $241,868 (up .7% from last week)

So, higher price = the cashews . Higher inventory = soda.

But looking at the bigger picture, as you know I love, inventory is down compared to early December and prices are up. Scotch and cashews!

I’m suddenly hungry and thirsty.

Also, it has just been released the inventory in 29 major markets is DOWN. This is some of the first good news on a broad scale that we’ve seen since the whole debacle started.

Bottom, bottom. Where is that bottom?

Now, for the “graphfluent” readers among you:

As always, whether the news is good or bad, you’ll see it here.

_________________________________________________________

If you have questions, comments or a good joke to share shoot me an email.  I’m a full time Realtor®, I love what I do and would be thrilled to hear from you.

* All data from Triad Multiple Listing Service (MLS). “Single-family” does not include Duplexes or manufactured homes.

Back in the day, if you wanted to get some information about a house like, say, this little beauty…

Gorgeous home in Greensboro (Listed by Yost & Little Realty)

…you would make note of the for sale sign in front and call the listing company. Then you would say something like,

“..Yes..I was on may way to work this morning and wanted to know about the house listed at 700 Country Club Drive. I was wondering how much they’re asking for it..”

Now, you may or may not have been in the market for a house. And you may or may not have been in a position to pay the $4.85 million dollars being asked. You would have spent another 90 seconds inquiring about bedrooms, bathrooms, size of the pool house (!) and all the other questions someone asks when they are – or want to appear to be – seriously interested in a house.

You would then either try to make an appointment to see it or tell the person on the other end of the line that you would be back in touch.

You would then move on to the next telephone number on your list and start the process all over.

Or you may not have had a specific address in mind but wanted to know what was on the market meeting your criteria. For that you might have scoured neighborhoods, the local newspaper, The Real Estate Book. All good sources.

Nowadays, though statistics state that over 80% of home buyers look to the internet when searching for a house.

You want to to know about the house at 700 Country Club Drive? You go to a online website and search. Or use the price, size, zip code parameters provided by the sites to drill down to the houses that are possible maybes.

There are MANY sites from which to choose. Some are pretty dead on with their data. Others, not so much.

Let’s take a quick look.

The data from most of these sites is pulled from various Multiple Listing Services (MLS). Every market is part of a MLS. That means that when a house is listed by a Realtor®, that property’s details are entered into the local MLS. (The Greensboro market is part of the Triad MLS). *

These feeds from the various MLS’s are what you see when you search a site. The breadth of MLS feeds and frequency of those feeds are what differentiate online real estate search sites.

• Realtor.com is the behemoth of the national network of MLS’s. All MLS’s in the country feed into the site and are updated every 24 hours.
• Yahoo! Real Estate is a popular site. Hmmm. I have issues with it.
• Homes.com – I have even more issues with it.
• Trulia.com
• Zillow.com
• listingbook.com – This is a great site not yet available to the entire country. It’s data is updated, at least from our MLS, every hour.

I performed a decidedly unscientific experiment. I looked to our local MLS and searched for properties listed in Greensboro zip code 27410. No other parameters.  Ther result was 499 listings. I then went to each of these sites and searched for the same sole criteria – 27410 zip code.

Here are the results, in order of accuracy:

• listingbook.com (498)
• Realtor.com (551)
• trulia.com (553)
• yahoo! (631) several properties were listed twice
  
• homes.com (55) I have no idea where the data feed is from
  
• zillow.com (4459) …..!!? I couldn’t make it drill down to the one zip code.
  

The point of all this is not to discourage using the internet to start the search for a house. I use the internet to search for everything from appliances to martini glasses. But know that some sources will have outdated or unclear information.

I may be missing a trick on a couple of these sites, but I tried to approach the process as would any other consumer.

In the end, what you want to do is make sure you’re getting the full picture on what’s available to you so you can make an educated decision. Just as you would if buying a washing machine.

Or martini glasses.

* There are sites that pull data only from their own company’s listings, some show public record information or show properties which are listed as For Sale By Owner (FSBO) where there is not a real estate agent involved.

Back in the day, Realtors® were the holders of the real estate gold. That is, the data about houses that were listed for sale: price, number of bedrooms, etc., If you wanted to get the dish on that house you just drove past on your way to work you needed to call the listing company or another Realtor® and ask.

That agent would look into the magical database, otherwise known as the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) where would be found in a glance the listing price, tax value, dimensions of the kitchen, which elementary school district the property is in and on and on.

Ah, those were the days.

These days, if a property catches your eye or if you want to find out what houses meet your criteria, the public has access to much of the same data as agents. There’s the grandmother of all real estate search sites, Realtor.com, as well as FrontDoor.com, listingbook.com, Zillow, not to mention the innumerable individual agent and company websites that have “search for listings” links in them (including this one).

In a future post I’ll examine the differing search results for these sites. They are most definitely not all on the same page. No pun intended.

So, who needs an agent? All they are good for is data and anyone can get that now. Right?

Honestly, that is all some agents are good for. Let’s face it, some real estate agents have not needed to be anything more than present over the past 5 years or so to make a living selling real estate.

But real estate doesn’t have the market cornered on members who don’t bring much to the table. There are doctors who can’t seem to relate to sick people (an odd career choice on their part), lawyers who offer no advise but merely carry out your suggestions and politicians who… Well, let’s not go there.

Getting past the ‘place holder’ agents who will undoubtedly need to find another line of work as the real estate market continues its interesting adjustments, there are good agent who offer qualities which have nothing to do with providing info on when a house was built, how many square feet there are and whether there’s gas heat or not.

They bring perspective, guidance, suggestions. They point out when your money will buy more house in the next neighborhood or when you’re about to get ripped off by your lender or whether the attorney your cousin suggested may be great for getting you out of a speeding ticket but may not be a good choice to handle a title search and decipher instructions from the mortgage lenders package.

Frankly, finding a house is not a great challenge. Particularly not these days. They’re’ EVERYWHERE!

But there is angst and fear associated with buying a house. There should be. It’s a big deal. A very big deal.

You don’t want to be in it alone.

Let’s say you find a house that interests you via one of the aforementioned resources. For the most part, if the property shows up on the online site, it has gotten there through a feed from a Multiple Listing Service.

That means, a real estate agent has listed it.

That means the seller has an real estate agent representing them.

Shouldn’t you?

So, bypassing an agent in searching for a house (BTW, working with a buyer’s agent doesn’t cost anything*) will not mean you bypass all agents. You just end up talking to someone who represents a seller.

Are Realtors® obsolete? Some are. Some started out that way.

But there are many, many honest, dedicated and enthusiastic agents who will help you through the process. And in buying a house, it’s the process that’s important.

* This holds true for most standards of practice. There may be some markets where buyers agents attempt to charge fees. That has not been the practice in the Greensboro area.