Realtor.com: Freshness counts

The drive to freshness is on in the real estate industry. And it doesn’t involve a bake sale.

Real estate search site Realtor.com is combating the slow housing market with fresher property information.

About one-third of the 4.4 million property listings at the popular search site, which is operated by Move Inc. through a contract with the National Association of Realtors, are updated every 15 minutes, the company announced on Monday.

"In an ever-changing market, people searching stale listings can easily lose their dream homes to competing buyers" said Rei Mesa, president and COO of Prudential Florida WCI Realty, in the Move Inc. announcement. "Having the freshest listings available gives them a competitive edge," Mesa stated, by helping them to keep up with price changes trends.

While there are several real estate Web sites that offer up for-sale property information supplied by industry professionals and multiple listing services, Realtor.com has enjoyed a relationship with a large group of multiple listing services that send property information for display at the site. Trulia, a real estate search and marketing site, relies primarily on data feeds supplied by real estate brokers, while real estate search and valuation site Zillow receives property listings information from a combination of agents, brokers and MLSs.

About 203 MLS systems are feeding Realtor.com updated property data every 15 minutes for about 1.55 million listings, while 180 MLSs feed 438 listings twice daily and two MLSs provide updates every four hours, according to the announcement. There are about 900 MLSs nationwide.

"The most sophisticated tools for searching and analyzing listings are only as good as the freshness of the data," said Errol Samuelson, Realtor.com president, in a statement.

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