December 5, 2007
A 21st Century Way To Search
Photo by William Self from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
It seems like everyone in the city is looking for a new place to live. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of competition to find that oh-so-perfect abode, and you’ve only got a few (relatively meagre) resources at your disposal to help you in your search. Luckily for you, we have your back.
By now, you’re all probably pretty familiar with the debacle that is mls.ca, and we told you way back in the day about housing123.com, which we liked very much indeed. You can also get your search on at househunting.ca, ren.ca, and of course viewit.ca, for all you renters.
Well, a new player in the house-hunting game has entered the fray. Century 21 has recently revamped their website. Is this fresh-faced competitor ready to contend for the title of "Best Housing Search Website On The Internet In Canada For Canadians"?
To their credit, Century 21 took some of the good stuff you liked about housing123.com (i.e. plotting their matching properties to a Google Map and not sucking as hard as mls.ca) and added a much more polished interface. Still missing in action, however, is the useful neighbourhood/cross-streets search function we love so dearly on housing123.com.
The site creators incorporated a couple of "value-added" features, such as an agent and agency directory search (right) that's actually kind of nifty. You can also click on an agent's picture to see a summary of the properties they've sold, which are also plotted to the map (the agents likely have to pay extra for that). This feature is a pretty good idea, but it didn't work for most of the agents we clicked on, and getting back to your original search page was...well, we'll let you know when we get back to our original search page. They also included a blog, which at this point looks to be more of a clearing house for official Century 21 press releases than anything else. They're trying though, bless their hearts.
What you're all really interested in, however, are search results. The unfortunate fact is that the new Century 21 site doesn’t list nearly as many hits as housing123…unless we were searching incorrectly. (That’s certainly not impossible, but if we got it wrong, who’s to say the average user won’t do the same?) Compare the following screenshots, both focused on King and Spadina; on the left—housing123.com, and on the right—century21.ca:
To be fair, it would make sense that Century 21 is only listing the properties they represent, making this site more useful for people who plan to be, or already are, Century 21 clients. So where does that leave the rest of us? When used in conjunction with the other resources available, this site still might help you find the place of your dreams. Too bad you still can't afford it.
|
I don't get it, why is MLS "known" as a bad site?
Oh, gawd, where do I start...MLS is a hideous monstrosity of a website, straight out of 1997. They're a bit better since their recent redesign, but the photos are of atrocious quality and are improperly scaled (no, photos certainly aren't important for a site like this), and they block external linking, so you have to go through their convoluted system.
Plus, you'd think that since it's a website and not a newspaper classified ad, they could have proper, explicit descriptions of listings rather than stuff like, "Jr1Br D/Wash, P. avail, lg L/R & D/R ******EXTRAS AVAIL.**** upg. incl MustSee!"
It's mainly the inexplicable uselessness of the photos that irks me, aside from having to perform a million steps to get to the stuff you want.
but, to be fair, a site like 123housing is only good for their proximity search which does use the MLS database. they're making the search easier, but not showing the info about the listings, well, at all.
and as for the annoying copy on MLS, i suspect it's due to greedy real estate agents doing what little they can to keep the general public thinking that real estate is confusing and requires professional "translation".
and there will never be a comprehensive real estate listing site for that very reason--it's not profitable to the agents to 'give it all up' for free.
Exactly - the site is not simply not user-friendly. I also didn't want to re-tread the same ground as the housing123.com post I linked to from August -- where the arguments against mls.ca were much more eloquently articulated than I could have made them.
Plus, I've spent countless hours (well...a few hours, anyway) plugging addresses into Google Maps to locate specific listings...at least for the listings where they actually provide an address.
The listings pulled from MLS in Housing123 aren't entirely useful since MLS blocks the hotlinks. The information and photos are presented much more efficiently and usefully on century21.ca, ren.ca and househunting.ca. I always wonder why MLS has resisted higher-quality photos and better presentation of data all this time. Probably because they have you no matter what, so why put in the effort?
I'm not sure that MLS "has resisted higher-quality photos" as such — don't the listing agents provide all of the information, including the pictures? In addition to noting the included "gas burner" and "ELFs", it seems that most of them whip out a camera phone and take the most godawful, useless pictures they can manage.
Sometimes the pictures are attractive, or even useful. Agents who operate less-than-completely-appalling Web sites of their own tend to submit decent shots to MLS as well.
How about for us renters? We don't all make foreign-owned blogger salaries you know.
I moved back to Toronto this October (after a 6 month hiatus in South Korea) and it took me two months to find an apartment I could 1) afford, 2) stand upright in, 3) get to work from in under an hour. I'm now paying nearly $300 more than I was in January for a place two blocks to the west.
I was checking no less than 6 sites daily (hourly, in some cases) and it still took 8 weeks to find something that wasn't a basement or a $1200 shoebox.
It was worth the wait though, because my new place is totally sweet.
century21 has done a decent job but as you noted the problem with their site, and every other brokerage site, is that they only have their listings.
Even if a home buyer is working with a century21 agent, I don't think they want to limit their search to century21 listings. so why bother using their site?
This is very different from the US where brokerages share data. So a century21 website would have all listings available for the MLS area that they belong to. This has allowed brokerages to build some very cool websites for home buyers. It has also resulted in a few innovative companies like Redfin starting up (www.redfin.com) that rebate part of their commission to buyers. The idea behind Redfin is that if home buyers,instead of the agent, are now doing all of the house searching those same buyers should get a rebate for taking over some of the agent's workload.
Unfortunately I don't see any data sharing going on in Toronto any time soon. So our options remain: a few cool sites with some of the listings, or a bad site with all the listings.