The Zillow website has become very popular with people looking for a property to purchase. It provides listings of homes for sale with photos, floor plans, descriptions and more. They even provide a "Zestimate" which is an estimated value of the property based on publicly available records about the home and recent sales in the area. It is important to understand that Zillow does not create or manage these property listings. No one from Zillow has ever stepped foot inside any of these properties. All the property details come from real estate brokers and their sellers. They are sent directly to Zillow from Multiple Listing Services across the country. Zillow then republishes the information along with their computer-generated Zestimate.
What many consumers don't realize is that when they click on a Zillow property listing to schedule a tour or ask for more information, their request DOES NOT go to the broker that listed the property for sale. Zillow sells these "leads" to other brokers that often know nothing about the property.
In the Chicago area the Multiple Listing Service (MRED) has a special section for new listings that aren't quite ready for the full MLS. It's known as the PLN, or Private Listing Network. These properties are NOT shared with Zillow or other public facing sites such as Redfin, Realtor.com, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, etc. It provides sellers and their brokers an opportunity to: test a price, test demand, generate interest with "coming soon", and/or show the property to limited audience of serious buyers that are working with a broker. PLN properties can only be seen by buyers that are working with brokers. Additionally, most of the larger brokerage firms have internal tools that allow their brokers to share information on "pocket listings" within the brokerage. These are properties with a signed agreement to sell, but that aren't ready for the MLS yet.
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