Searching online for a home: Many websites, varying insights

The Web is awash in sites that promise to help focus a home search, with an extraordinary range of tools.

We asked three firms that measure Internet traffic to list the most-visited real estate websites in the country, excluded a few that weren't relevant to our search and came up with a top 10 list of "for-sale" sites. Then we took each site for a test drive, using a hypothetical search for home listings.

Over two days in June, we searched each site for three-bedroom, single-family homes on the market in Santa Monica. The number of homes for sale that the sites found ranged from 49 to 168.

Some of the sites wowed us with maps, data and detailed listings and let us tailor our searches umpteen ways. Others seemed less focused on finding a home than on putting us into the hands of a real estate agent or mortgage broker. Some buried useful tools behind "advanced search" links.

Here, in an admittedly subjective presentation, is what we found at the sites we sampled, ranked according to search results, from the most houses found to the fewest:

Zillow.com: The wildly popular home-valuation site also offers for-sale listings, and it turned up 168 homes with three or more bedrooms, though individual listings were slim on details. The site is loaded with gadgetry, such as mapping the listed homes via Microsoft Virtual Earth; the maps also link smoothly to homes for sale nearby. Its voyeuristic "Make Me Move" function allows people who don't have their homes on the market to nonetheless specify a minimum offer that might get them to change their minds.

Mortgage shopping? Zillow allows users to anonymously enter personal information to shop for rates and terms and claims the anonymity has drawn a strong response from consumers. Zillow's Real Estate Guide is a wiki feature (meaning readers can edit it) about various aspects of the real estate market.

HomeGain.com: The "about" section on the site makes no secret of its dedicated function as a lead generator -- that is, putting real estate agents in contact with consumers. (Full disclosure: HomeGain is a unit of Classified Ventures, a joint venture of several newspaper companies, including Tribune Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times.)

Our tour through HomeGain turned into a puzzling experience. To get anywhere on this site, you must register your name, phone and e-mail address, and HomeGain then connects you to the site of an affiliated real estate agent. On the first day of our HomeGain house hunt, we checked the box for a minimum of three bedrooms and turned up 142 listings. However, these turned out to be all types of properties, including condos. When we narrowed the selection to single-family homes, the site told us "none of the listings meet your criteria."

We went back to HomeGain the next day and tried to look again. But this time -- and in numerous attempts thereafter -- we didn't get the link to the Santa Monica real estate agent at all. Instead, we turned up 48 homes -- all of them foreclosure listings through RealtyTrac, an online company that specializes in foreclosure data.

What happened to our original 142 homes? A spokesman for HomeGain said we got the RealtyTrac version because of the way HomeGain contracts with agents. Individual agents pay to have their listings pop up on HomeGain a certain number of times. When we made our return visit, that agent no longer was participating, said company spokeswoman Jessica Gopalakrishnan.

"We cover about 80% of the areas in the United States, but right now, that area doesn't appear to be covered," and so our specific search defaulted to the RealtyTrac data, she said.

She suggested that, in such cases, typing in criteria for a suburb near Santa Monica could connect to an agent whose site could deliver the desired listings.

ZipRealty.com: A search of this site turned up 126 listings of three bedrooms or more.

But what we got on Zip was less a "listing" than a spartan list: Each property garnered one line, specifying the number of bedrooms and baths, lot size, square footage, price and price reduction, if any, and whether pictures were available. If you want to see more -- photos, neighborhood information etc. -- you must register by supplying a name, phone and e-mail. The site uses Microsoft Virtual Earth to map the location of each listing.

The company says it will announce a number of new mapping and foreclosure-data features in the coming week.

RealEstate.Yahoo.com: The Yahoo search engine’s real estate arm found 107 properties with three-plus bedrooms. The site allows you to map gas stations, schools and other local amenities and comparable recent home sales, plugging in records from Zillow.com.

It profiles local schools, throwing in parent comments from another site, GreatSchools.net; demographic information on Santa Monica contained the predictable household income data etc. but also included political party affiliations, so you can gauge the likelihood of sparring with your neighbors come November.