Nathan Walldorf
As of Tuesday at midnight, the Zillow Group (that recently acquired Trulia) will lose the feed that gives it the Chattanooga area’s listing information.
The Greater Chattanooga Association of Realtors (GCAR) currently uses a company called ListHub to send its listings out to other home search websites. The Zillow Group’s contract with ListHub expires today, and ListHub decided to no longer provide the Zillow Group their feeds to homes for sale.
That means that any data that one depended on Zillow to give them in the past will be even more incorrect and outdated in the future. Zillow used raw data taken from tax records to “estimate home values” through an algorithm. That system doesn’t take into account that the home could be on the lake, on a mountain brow, or even extremely nice inside and out. You need a realtor to do that accurately, a human being.
Currently the Greater Chattanooga Association of Realtors does not want to sign a contract with the Zillow Group to give them data due to the one-sided nature of Zillow’s agreement for how it will use the data. The Zillow Group sought to establish its own direct feed with companies and realtor associations, but the associations and many companies are tired of the misinformation that is so common on Zillow’s sites.
A home buyer or seller's best bet for the best information on homes for sale will be #1 a realtor and #2 local real estate websites like GCAR.net. Realtors live in Chattanooga and have real knowledge of the Chattanooga real estate market, so depend on a person and not on an algorithm for your information.