Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com

[Nicole D.]

Is it possible to find a good rental property investment on Zillow, Trulia or Realtor.com? Presumably, if the listing has made it to these sites, they have been passed up by many investors already. What does everyone think about this? Would you recommend avoiding finding an investment on them? Any advice would be appreciated!

[Anson Young]

Nicole, 

There might be a slight misunderstanding when it comes to these sites. They are actually syndications of your local MLS - they get their data from MLS, and should be pretty accurate. When an agent puts in the listing to their MLS, those sites get fed information from the MLS system every 10 minutes (or so), and listings start showing up on those external sites, with all of the data that was input from the agent.

Sometimes the listing takes 10 minutes to get to zillow or like sites, sometimes its a whole day.  Just depends on the system.

Those sites are totally fine to find deals, without direct MLS access, those sites are the next best thing to get a hold of this data.