Real Estate Today
By Wayne Curtis
I Saw It On the Web!
The Internet has certainly revolutionized the way that people shop for real estate. It has also made it much more likely that inaccurate, out-of-date, and even fraudulent information makes it into your inbox. Here's a primer for the homebuyer in the Internet age.
The Situation
Before the Internet was born, listings were literally kept in a book -- available at each real estate office -- containing the listings that office's agents were presenting to the public. Searching for a home meant a lot of driving around looking for signs, visiting offices to look at the listing books, and reliance upon the agent knowing what was available that met your criteria.
Once the Internet was widely available, the real estate industry was one of the earliest players and multiple listing services (MLS) quickly got their member brokers to agree to make everyone's listings available to the general public. Brokers also wanted to make the MLS available on their own websites, and so an Internet Data Exchange agreement let the number of sites who carried listing data multiply quickly.
National search sites, such as REMAX.com and Realtor.com, started to bring together listing data from all across the country. Others came up with the idea to offer computerized property evaluation services, and another group of sites let customers who had visited certain properties blog about their impressions of it, so that the next buyers who came along could read about the property's weaknesses and strengths without stepping foot inside it themselves. The modern Internet is bulging at its virtual seams with real estate related data of all kinds.
