Overstock.com officially announced its Real Estate section today in an email to Overstock subscribers. We at Living Well in San Mateo have known about Overstock’s new real estate section for a few months now, but after receiving the email we decided to revisit the site to see what, if anything, had changed. I must say, we were not too impressed with what we found.
Overstock attempts to replicate the type of internet marketing that tech-savvy local brokers are able to provide their clients. Let’s take a look at what they provide from a buyer’s perspective (since the seller’s perspective is an entire post on its own).
At first glance, Overstock seems to have several property listings (today they claim to have 3,746,746 properties) on their site. However, when we tried to search distressed homes in 94002 (Belmont), we found 0 listings. What Overstock did provide us, however, was their “close match” in Kyle, TX.
As Kyle is half way across the country from Belmont, I’m not sure how they are defining ‘close’ on that one. Although there are not many distressed Belmont properties on the market, we did find four on our sister site, SanMateoHomesInfo.com.
Next, we tried foreclosures in Belmont. We found seven active listings on our sister site, SanMateoHomesInfo for the search ‘foreclosures in Belmont’ and found eight generic listings on Overstock.
However, when you click on these properties listed on Overstock, you are taken to a very generic property listing on another site, LiveDeal. LiveDeal provides the property’s price, city, and street name.
If you want more information, you must sign up for an account, free for 7 days, but its not clear how much consumers pay for this site once the 7 day free trial is over.
What we did not find a shortage of in Overstock’s real estate section were ads, in many of our screen shots there were often more ads than properties. In our experience, buyers want to view pictures of listings, know exactly where the property is located, save properties they liked, all on one reliable website. Our sister site, San Mateo Homes Info provides exactly that and best of all, it is free to access and not just for 7 days. Buyers can save properties, create email alerts, view a complete list of foreclosures and pre-foreclosures in San Mateo and Santa Clara County. If it is important that you be the first to know when these properties are listed, shoot us an email and we will put you on our special alert email system. Minutes after properties that meet your specifications are listed, you will get an email in your inbox with full details of the property.
As we have said before, real estate is local. Even on the internet, buyers need to find a great local resource for real estate information, no matter where in the country you are located. Overstock.com is interested in selling advertising space to national advertisers not in helping buyer find homes in the Hayward Park neighborhood of San Mateo, CA.
We invite you to explore our sister site, San Mateo Homes Info, our complete San Mateo County real estate resource. We’d love to hear your feedback on how we measure up!
Other Posts You May Enjoy
- The Professionals’ Guide to Buying a Home
- The Home Sales Maximizer
- The Mortgage Adoption Center
- San Mateo County Emergency Alert
- Google Earth: Helping You Buy Your New Home
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Raymond Stoklosa, Broker/Co-Owner
Chela Stoklosa, Realtor/Co-Owner
