Dear Real Estate 2.0, We Need Better “Recently Sold” Data

By Andrew Meyer |

Real estate 2.0 is right up my alley. Check my "About" page for why.

Btw: Sorry to everyone out there who feels like throwing up everytime they hear "2.0" put after a word. If there was a better, more understood term I would use it. Trust me.

Ok, so I've been using sites like Trulia and Zillow a lot lately trying to find "recently sold" data on homes in my area (Congrats to Trulia for cracking comScore's Top Ten rankings for December 2007).

I've found that good "recently sold" data is hard to come by. Sometimes it seems non-existent.

When compared to all the cool, interactive "for sale" data found on these sites the "recently sold" data really pales in comparison.

To be fair, most of these sites are set-up for consumers who are in the market to buy a house. So, they are usually concerned with only "for sale" data.

However, I think that "recently sold" data is just as important for the consumer and should be made just as available, clear and interactive as the "for sale" data.

With this said, Trulia's market trend data really confuses me. Particularly, their "Avg price/sq ft" data.

Check it out:

What confuses me?

It seems that they provide average price per bedroom instead of average price per square foot.

Their is a huge difference between the two. And, anyone trying to get a good data on "Avg price/sq ft" won't find it on Trulia's market trend tool.

For that matter, I don't think the actual average price per bedroom data they provide is very useful either. Since it doesn't seem to correlate with the square footage of the house.

For instance, what does "one bedroom" mean in their formula?

I assume that one bedroom means one bedroom since the recently sold 7,641 square foot home below doesn't show up in the results when I filter for homes with 3-4 bedroom and between 6000-9000 sq ft at the same time.

Check it out.

Recently sold 7,641 sq ft home (using 6000-9000 sq ft filter):

Filtered for both 3-4 bedrooms and 6000-9000 sq ft homes:

What did the above pictures tell me?

It tells me that 1-2 bedroom homes in their market trend data for "Avg price/sq ft" (which actually is average price per bedroom) could made up of 1-2 bed homes as big as 7,641 sq ft or 1-2 bed homes as small as 840 sq ft.

Let's say all the 2-bedrooms homes in Trulia's market trend tool are small 2-bed homes. This tool wouldn't be helpful for someone who is in the market for large 2-bedroom houses if he can't differentiate.

You have to give it to them for even having "recently sold" data though.

It should be noted that Trulia market trends data is much better than the previous option of getting no results from your local newspapers' Sunday real estate insert

In the past, the only way you could get that data was if you were an agent or had an inside connection with one.

Anyways, the future of real estate 2.0 is very bright.

I have RSS subscriptions to everyone in the group of bloggers I call the "Real Estate 2.0 Mafia."

The "Real Estate 2.0 Mafia" blogs include Trulia, Zillow, GeekEstate, 1000Watt, Future of Real Estate Marketing and InmanNews.

They are all interesting reads but they come across as a serious posse. Definitely check them all out.

I look forward to adding my voice to the real estate 2.0 conversation.