A Newer, More Educated Consumer?

In the years following the mortgage crisis, a new emphasis was placed on educating consumers regarding housing, leading to the popularization of several informative websites and listing syndication portals, like Zillow and realtor.com, that aim to help aid consumers throughout the homebuying or selling process. However, as the Internet is wont to do, the accuracy of the information can be questionable and, as a result, agents are now faced with a secondary battle of disarming clients of potential misinformation.

“Websites like that don’t influence the end result, the ultimate price, but it makes it more difficult for agents to obtain a listing and deal with the seller,” said Giodarno, who admitted that even before syndication sites were launched, sellers were notorious for unrealistic expectations. “It’s made the discussion of price more difficult, as well as the process of getting a client to trust that you’re going to sell it for the best possible price.”

Giodarno, Morales and Monge all agree that the rise of consumer real estate resource websites is not a wholly bad development. They believe the sites encourage buyers and sellers to enter the market and gives them some degree of insight, but as Monge pointed out, the market moves too quickly for public-facing websites to keep an accurate archive of closing sales prices, which ultimately leads to unrealistic expectations among sellers.

“Because the market is moving rather quickly, all comparables will not end up on the syndication sites,” Monge said. “It makes it difficult for them to track sales and available inventory.”

To bolster Monge’s point, Morales added that the information provided on such websites is also simply “too generic” to be of any real value in terms of pricing. He says that these sites can ignore certain local market nuances that affect price, such as the difference in price of a corner unit vs. a higher floor unit in a multifamily development.

But it is not as though real estate agents are completely unequipped to handle the increasingly widespread distribution of what they see as inadequate pricing information. As customers have been provided new tools, so have agents.