A study first published on Real Times showing the listing claims on some leading real estate websites are vastly inflated has sparked a firestorm in the online real estate community -- including lawsuit threats and accusations of bias.

Early on the evening of Feb. 4, Real Times published a story that researchers for Clareity Consulting, an MLS consulting firm, had performed a manual property listing "audit" of four of the largest real estate advertising sites on the Internet -- RealSelect's Realtor.com, Moore Data's Cyberhomes, HomeSeekers.com, and Microsoft's HomeAdvisor.

That audit initially found all four sites inflated the number of listings they carried by from anywhere from 8% to 170%, although the HomeSeekers.com numbers are being revised.

On Thursday night and through Friday morning, HomeSeekers.com and MSN HomeAdvisor were threatening to sue Clareity over the report.

HomeSeekers.com Vice Chairman Doug Swanson said late Friday that his company had worked out its differences with Clareity's methodology, and Clareity was revising its numbers for HomeSeekers.com

"We've given him good tools to go through and check out listings. That was part of the problem, they didn't have the right tool," Swanson said.

Despite that revision, Clareity CEO Gregg Larson said he and his company stand behind the report.

"With (MSN) HomeAdvisor, we got the response of 'Well, your numbers are wrong,'" Larson said. "So we'd say, 'So what is the right number?' And they replied, 'We're not telling you.'

"We absolutely stand by it," Larson said. "We did that study as fairly as we could, we used proper methodology, and when in doubt, we rounded up."

Larson said putting the information together was difficult because all the real estate advertising sites in the audit -- including the leading four, RealSelect's Realtor.com, Moore Data's Cyberhomes, HomeSeekers.com, and Microsoft's HomeAdvisor -- used entirely different systems.

"There were duplicate listings on some of the sites, and you have to remember that these are dynamic, growing databases," Larson said.

According to the study, Realtor.com's numbers were most accurate. The site boasts more than 1.3 million homes for sale, but Clareity only found 1,202,677, which the company then confirmed.

Because the study's results did make Realtor.com look the most accurate in its marketing, others have accused Larson of doing the study at the behest of Realtor.com or RealSelect.

Larson denied any link whatsoever.

Microsoft's HomeAdvisor listings were inflated by more than 170%, the study found. HomeAdvisor claims 500,000, but Clareity only showed 186,873 listings.

HomeAdvisor spokesmen point out their 500,000 number claim is based on a number of agreements they have recently signed, and therefore not all listings due are available on-line, although they will be added soon.

Cyberhomes boasted 650,000 listings, or 100% more, prior to the audit than Clareity found, which was only 335,847. Cyberhomes afterward provided Clareity with a listing count of 360,000, pointing out many more were being added.

Larson said 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.

Published: February 5, 1999

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