Confused By Some Data On Zillow? You Are Not Alone! Here Is Why It Happens!
Scott P. Rogers
If you use Zillow to peruse real estate listings or to search for your dream home, you might be baffled at some of the data you are seeing sometimes...
- a seven car garage?
- a basement when there is no basement?
- 3.5 bathrooms = 4 bathrooms?
- a townhouse = a condo?
- $600 per month homeowner association fees?
If you're getting confused when perusing the details of a property on Zillow, don't spend too much time trying to figure out what is going on. It's much more likely that Zillow is unintentionally creating the confusion than it is that the property is actually that confusing.
The details of any given property on Zillow end up being a combination of data from the local real estate records (for example Harrisonburg and Rockingham County) which is then combined with, augmented by, corrected by the data coming from the MLS.
It's the latter half of that (data from the MLS) that can end up causing some of the confusion.
Basically, our MLS has one set of fields in its database, and the data in those fields is feeding into another set of similar but not identical fields in the Zillow database. Sometimes the data coming out of the MLS doesn't quite end up where it ought to on Zillow, causing Zillow to show some erroneous and confusing property details.
So - if you're stumped by some of the details of a property on Zillow - do not fret - just shoot me an email (scott@hhtdy.com) and I'll see if I can sort things out for you.
