Most Buyers Begin by Looking on Web

Washington Times, September 1, 2006
By M. Anthony Carr

The latest buyer survey by the National Association of Realtors reveals that 80 percent of all buyers now begin their search online for real estate.

That's quite a surge in just a few years, when only about 7 percent of all buyers looked online when real estate and the Internet first met.

If any industry benefits the consumer online, it's real estate. There are millions of houses advertised online for buyers to peruse. They can view floor plans and watch video tours. It's all there, and it's free.

We take for granted what it takes to create such a system.

Today's electronic multiple listing service (MLS) began years ago on paper. Realtors across the country would turn in listings with a picture to the processing manager, who then handed them off to the local Realtor association.

Associations would then print up a book or cards and then hand-deliver them to real estate offices -- usually one per agent -- either weekly or biweekly. The MLS book was one of the most highly sought-after commodities in the Realtor's toolbox.

The MLS serves as a co-op between competing real estate agents so they can sell each others' listings.

The electronic MLS also starts and ends with these agents. Without the brokerages that gather data on millions of homes and pay billions in fees and programming costs, there would be no Internet-based real estate database.

There would be places online for homeowners to advertise their homes for sale, but there would not be a pure database, where buyers and sellers could come together with secure data updated daily.

I can't think of any other databases of homes for sale online that operate like the MLS.

The For-Sale-by-Owner-type Web sites are not databases. They are advertising, much like what you would find in a newspaper Web site.

Often, even after the property is sold, the ad for that property remains online for some time. Buyers don't really know if what they're clicking through is still on the market.

The Realtor-operated MLS systems are internally regulated. Agents can be fined for registering erroneous information or not updating information soon enough.

In fact, the information is so good that other Web site operators have taken aim at these online services. They want the information for their own sites.

NAR's Center for Realtor Technology has released two programs to help op "scraping" of the data by online predators.

"NoScrape" is a program that places the data into a rendering, or graphic file, from which data cannot be copied. Computers aimed at scraping data from real estate sites cannot strip the information from this type of Web page.

A second anti-piracy program is "reCaptcha," which "is a way to tell computers and humans apart and is based on CAPTCHA technology." CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

It identifies the party trying to access your site as a human or a computer program by generating questions that only a human can answer correctly. The reCaptcha program displays a distorted image of a word that a user must identify correctly and retype to gain passage to parts of the Web. This type of program is also used by financial, ticketing and Web log sites to ensure humans are using the site rather than computers.