Name:   John C - Subject:   Need help from John C on this Date:   1/31/2018 10:57:12 AM

the problem is that there is no simple answer. Zilow INTENTIONALLY makes it hard to discern because THEY DON'T CARE. Their goal IS NOT TO BE ACCURATE. Their goal is to have lots of pages on their site so that people come to it and they can use traffic to sell ads to agents. Once you understand that, the rest of it makes sense.

see my answer from earlier:

"To answer your question, most of the time the homes are not for sale and they're giving you an "estimate" on the price. But if it is really listed, the way to tell is to scroll down on the bottom and see if it says something like "info provided by X realty." Then that means it's for sale and there is a marginal chance that the price is right. I say marginal because usually it takes a really long time for any price changes etc to go through and make it to ZTR. "

To respond to your red dot question: just because they are showing a red dot doesn't necessarily mean it is for sale. a dot can mean lots of things like

1) it is actually active for sale

2) it was active for sale like three months ago but now it's sold and Zillow has not updated it correctly

3) it was active for sale like three years ago but the seller took it off the market and ZTR has not updated it correctly

4) it was never for sale and they just have a tax record on it and so they put it on their site. scroll down to see if it says "info provided by X realty." if not, then it definitely is not for sale

I've had consumers call me up asking about something that looks active that actually sold SEVEN YEARS AGO.

I could spend hours and hours giving reasons and examples why ZTR is a waste of time. Fake news. 

It's like opening up an issue of the Enquirer and having to go line by line and story by story explaining why it's all wrong. Once you go through an article or two and realize it's fake news, why waste your time any longer?  The Enquirer's goal is not to be accurate. It's to sell newspapers. At a certain point it's not worth going through every article to discern accuracy. You know it's fake news, and that is that.