What happened to all the listings on Zillow and Trulia?

You may have noticed that Zillow.com and Trulia.com are missing an awful lot of listings.  Yesterday marked the first day that national listing syndicator Listhub stopped sending it's feed of listing information to Zillow Group (owner of Zillow.com, Trulia.com and a number of other lesser known sites).  Listhub is a service that contracts with almost all of the MLS providers throughout the country to push their listing data to sites like Zillow, Trulia, Homes.com and dozens of others.  They collect all the data and arrange it into one easy to use data feed that the other sites can then use to populate their sites.

Move Inc, who happens to own REALTOR.com and Listhub, was recently purchased by Newscorp Inc.  They now had the ability to shut down the primary source of information to Zillow and Trulia in order to bolster REALTOR.com who gets a direct feed from every MLS in the nation thanks to an affiliation with The National Association of REALTORS.  that's exactly what they've done.  Some in the industry think that Zillow and Trulia could lose as much as 40% of the listing inventory on their sites due to this move.

Zillow Group is now scrambling to sign direct agreements with individual MLS providers and large brokerages in order to replace the data they lost.  Many brokers and MLS systems see this as an opportunity to fix some of the issues with the notoriously inaccurate sites and make sure that users are put in touch with the listing agent and firm rather than an agent who pays for those leads.  A number of MLS systems in northern Michigan and some large brokers have already signed direct agreements with Zillow Group allowing them to publish their listings under certain parameters that ensure accuracy and that leads will go to the listing agent or firm.  Many brokers and MLS systems have not yet signed similar agreements so the listing information in those areas is simply not going to appear on Zillow Group sites.

What does that mean to the user of these sites?  You may be seeing only a fraction of the available inventory in a given area when using Zillow or Trulia because they're missing a big chunk of data they had just a couple days ago.

That's where we come in!  We feed our site directly from the five MLS systems that we service so the information is always accurate, complete and up to date.  Users visited our site over 12,000 times in the last 30 days alone because they know they're getting the best information in the most convenient way possible.

Zillow Group may eventually be successful in gaining a lot more data back that they lost recently but it's tough to believe they'll be able to get EVERY MLS or EVERY broker to participate.  We'll keep you posted as things progress.  For now, head over to Homewaters.net and find out why so many other people use it as their go to source of listing information for recreational and waterfront property in northern, western and central Michigan!