If you’re looking for a home for rent in Austin TX, you are no doubt looking online. And a lot of you are using sites such as Zillow.com and Hotpads.com to browse Austin rental listings. I receive info requests from these two sites more than any other. There are approximately 30+ internet sites to which our listings are automatically fed. Most of the requests I receive are for rental homes (and sales listings) that are already leased or under contract for sale. But as a web searcher, you have no way of knowing status based on what these internet sites show you in the listing details.
For example, if you look at the current Crossland listings displayed on Hotpads.com, there are 10 listings total. Of these 10, half of them currently have a status of “Pending” in the Austin MLS, meaning they are under contract waiting to close (for sales listings) or have an accepted/approved application. We mark these listings “Pending” in the Austin MLS, so agents will stop showing them, but internet searchers don’t know the status and keep inquiring.
So, for the entire 30+ days a home is under contract, or the days that a homes is Pending with an accepted application but awaiting tenant move-in, these listings appear as “Active” or “Available” on the most popular internet search sites, when in fact they are not. In fact, half the Austin Rental listings that you see on Zillow and Hotpads are already leased, yet you’ll waste your time inquiring about these Austin rental listings because those sites show them as “Available” or “Active”.
What should agents and searchers do about this?
