Clareity Consulting, the premier MLS consulting firm, has completed its Clareity Special Report, a study which followed the "Real Estate Internet Advertising Shoot-Out" held in Washington, D.C.

In January 1999, Gregg Larson, the creator of the Clareity Shoot-Out, led a team of web researchers that performed a manual property listing "audit" of four of the largest real estate advertising sites on the Internet, including RealSelect's REALTOR.COM, Moore Data's Cyberhomes, HomeSeekers.com, and Microsoft's HomeAdvisor, which yielded some surprising results.

According to Larson, the goal of this study was to monitor the progress made by the leading listing aggregators since last April and independently verify the number of listings that can be found by a consumer on the public web site. Until now, to the best of anyone's knowledge, no outside professional has ever attempted to count the number of listings on the leading property advertising sites.

Clareity's method involved manually searching the listing sites in every state, city, and neighborhood possible, using as wide a search as possible, recording the number of search results and adding those numbers to reach a total for each site. To ensure the accuracy of the findings, two research groups worked independently.

Here are Clareity's findings:

¹ Number of Listings Claimed on Site or in Recent Press Releases.

² Number of Listings Clareity Was Able to Find on the Primary Public Site.

³ Listing Count Provided by Company to Clareity.

* CyberHomes links out to over two hundred thousand listings, including many listings in Canada, but these listings were not included since they are not on the CyberHomes site and they are not branded with a CyberHomes view.

** HomeSeekers.com disagreed with Clareity’s research results and provided a private SQL tool for direct access to the database. Using this tool, Clareity found more listings than we could using the public access method. At the request of HomeSeekers.com we are not publishing the results of our findings.

*** HomeAdvisor has claimed over 500,000 listings are under contract, but has not published a figure for the number of listings actually online.

Important Notes: All the leading sites were affected by lower than average listing counts in January 1999 due to two factors: 1) seasonal fluctuations, and 2) the strong real estate market in many areas of the country that has depleted listing inventories. For example, MLSNI (Chicagoland) has often had over 50,000 active residential listings in the past two years but currently sends only 40,000 active residential listings to the listing aggregators.

Clareity invited the listing sites to protest the numbers discovered by the study. The managers of the sites generally explained away the discrepancies as either market fluctuations, "pending" MLS agreements, or both. Only Homeseekers and HomeAdvisor disputed the findings for their sites as being significantly lower that their actual count.

By far the least discrepancy between advertised listings and actual listings was Realtor.com at 8 percent. Perry Morton, Vice President of Content for RealSelect, confirmed Clareity’s research results for Realtor.com. He said, "The current strong market and winter fluctuations accounts for the 8% variance in our 1.3 million listings as of November 30th."

CyberHomes president John Mosey explained that their claim of 650,000 properties is "the average annual inventory of the content partners under contract", not all of which are currently represented on the site.

"Rather than concentrating on numbers, we are going to concentrate on the quality of the consumer experience. That's the metric that counts, if what you're trying to do is to get buyers and sellers to use your service," Mosey was quoted as saying.

John Giaimo, president of HomeSeekers.com explained listing discrepancies as fluctuating listings. "We haven’t changed our published number more than 10% in six months, even though we’re adding 2 to 4 MLSs a week, because inventories are dropping."

HomeSeekers.com maintains thousands of listings in their database which are published under private label web sites for their broker clients. An example of this is the RE/MAX of Texas site, www.remax-texas.com. This private label, RE/MAX branded view, shows only RE/MAX listings and many of these listings would not have been found in a search of the HomeSeekers.com site. We also found contingent, pending, withdrawn and sold residential listings in the database, as well as some commercial properties that would not be found by a consumer visiting this site.

Giaimo concluded, "There’s no question that Realtor.com has the most eggs in their basket, but at the end of the day, HomeSeekers will be dead even with RealSelect."

As the newest kid on the block, HomeAdvisor has only been on-line for six months, and although the company has been very public in its announcements of listing partners, it played close to the vest on actual numbers of listings. Scott Smith and Ian Morris of HomeAdvisor, while disputing Clareity's estimate as low, would not divulge how many listings they actually have online at this time.

Explains Larson, "We tried very hard to be fair and accurate in this study. Our results show the number of active residential properties that we were able to find on the leading real estate sites. We gave the management of each site the opportunity to "show us the listings" if they didn’t like the way we counted or the number we arrived at. Some sites cooperated more than others did to help verify that our methodology and results were indeed very accurate for their sites. However, we can’t be certain that we found every listing on every site. It is also important to note that the listing count varies daily on each site and some sites are growing more rapidly than others are. We do not represent or guarantee the results of this study are 100% accurate, but we believe our methodology was sound and did not favor any one site."

For a full copy of the report, see Clareity Consulting.

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Published: February 4, 1999

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

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