I don't know if Redfin uses the same feeds, but their update times seem vastly superior to Trulia, Zillow & Estately. After spending 1 1/2 years trying to find a house in a turnkey-scarce market, and using RedFin (after it launched in our market a few months ago), Estately, Zillow, and Trulia in parallel - this was the killer feature of Redfin for me.
For instance, I knew an offer we had made on a house was going to fall through when I got an alert from Redfin half hour after sending the offer, that the house was pending. Similarly - I found, toured, offered, and signed on a house (and was alerted to the "new listing", "pending", and "sold" status by redfin) before Zillow even had is registered as "For Sale".
So I am genuinely curious how their feeds differ from the rest. I originally assumed they all just scraped the MLS, but maybe this isn't the case...?
Redfin is an actual real estate brokerage, and are therefore real members of the MLS, with access to the data that provides. The others are simply scraping via publicly available data. This is a major difference.
Is it a major difference, or just a matter of timeliness? The actual data that Zillow etc. has seems identical to any other service, and the same as the printouts that realtors give out that they are printing from MLS.
This is Glenn Kelman, Redfin's CEO. Thanks for using Redfin and glad to hear that we gave you a jump on getting a place.
To answer your question about Zillow, Trulia and Redfin: Zillow and Trulia are media portals; Redfin is a brokerage, started by software entrepreneurs but with our own real estate agents to represent people buying or selling a home.
As a brokerage, Redfin has complete access to the local Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) used by brokerages and their agents to list homes and record sales. In addition to MLS listings, Redfin shows for-sale-by-owner listings, foreclosures, and new-construction listings, but most of the listings on our site come from MLSs.
There are hundreds of local MLSs, each with different data publication rules, but nearly all MLSs only accept as members brokerages willing to contribute their own listings to the MLS database. As a result, Redfin has the most complete and most timely listing data of any major real estate app or website, but only covers about half the U.S.
Zillow and Trulia get some listing data through services that syndicate a selection of listings from the MLS and some by asking real estate agents to upload their listings. A variety of studies, sponsored by Realtor.com, ZipRealty and Redfin, have shown that Redfin and other MLS-powered sites have significantly more agent-listed homes than the portals; Redfin also gets data much sooner, both to show new listings and to recognize when old listings have been sold.
For instance, I knew an offer we had made on a house was going to fall through when I got an alert from Redfin half hour after sending the offer, that the house was pending. Similarly - I found, toured, offered, and signed on a house (and was alerted to the "new listing", "pending", and "sold" status by redfin) before Zillow even had is registered as "For Sale".
So I am genuinely curious how their feeds differ from the rest. I originally assumed they all just scraped the MLS, but maybe this isn't the case...?