A December, 2011 report prepared by WAV Group for the MLS Domains Association concluded that nearly 60 percent of home-buyer / shopper respondents would rather visit an MLS site than a third party site such as “Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Yahoo, etc.”  The two reasons given for the preference were that the MLS sites were considered to have the most  up-to-date, accurate and trustworthy information, and that consumers wanted to shop for homes at their leisure without being solicited by an agent or broker before they were ready.

Before assuming this to be solid information on consumers in general, one must take into account the source of the survey respondents. Of the 400 respondents, 300 heard of the survey while visiting one of six local US MLS-owned sites. The other 100 were consumers who had recently bought or sold a home, provided by a paid list service. No one attempted to solicit consumers while they were visiting Zillow, Trulia or Realtor.com, unfortunately.  Continue reading →