Mls Input: Fill & Download for Free

The main difference is that Realtor.com has listings that are inputted into any of the regional MLS systems, systems operated as non-profits and overseen by a board of local brokers, where Zillow or Trulia aggregate their listing data from individual broker sites (Coldwell Banker's listings automatically syndicate to Trulia and Zillow).Trulia and Zillow also pull their data from other sources (e.g. Oodle, hotpads, etc.), which Realtor.com does not do.So what's the difference? Zillow and Trulia may include more rentals as well as off-market or up and coming listings that a broker is marketing yet hasn't loaded into the MLS database. Realtor.com does not do this.A big drawback of this is that Zillow and Trulia can have some incorrect data. Zillow's 'Zestimate' is also a very poor indicator of anything resembling true market value for any home.

You can input data into the MLS via a secure site for licensed professional Realtors. Basic information in uploaded via county record, while other statistics are input manually. Some Brokerages have office personnel who have this job and take care of this for the entire office. If you are a new agent, your office manager or broker of record will explain the process and help you.

As both a fan of Chicago in general and a fan of not living in closets or two hours from my office, my opinion is that the salary disparity of the San Francisco job isn’t high enough to make it the worthwhile option. Just saying “go with the higher salary” doesn’t really get to the meat of just how insane San Francisco real estate prices and competition are, especially when you have multiple kids and are living on one salary. You can’t bunk with a bunch of tech bros in a communal house, you know?Both San Francisco and Chicago offer nice urban living and suburban too if that’s what you’re looking for, and all that entails (museums and cultural offerings, shopping, schools, universities). They both have decent transport links (although Chicago’s central location is more attractive to me, but maybe not for you). I’d say that unless you really liked one city’s culture or location above another, the cities themselves are a wash.I think the real estate issue is probably what’s going to have to make or break you here. And that’s where the Bay Area salary being higher, even a lot higher, doesn’t help as much.Let’s say you’re looking at a 3-bed, 2-bath (or more) property in Chicago. Using the rule of 3 (3x your salary is what you could afford to pay for property), we’ll say that in Chicago you could spend up to $750K; we’ll set a lower boundary of $500K. Zillow returns over 770 properties in those parameters, and looking at the map, they’re just about all in prime locations along Lake Michigan. These are in Chicago.Here’s a $750K 3B/3Ba condo in Lincoln Park: 2141 N Clark St # 2, Chicago, IL 60614 | MLS #10171092 | ZillowHere’s a $699K 5B/4Ba house in Albany Park: 4235 N St. Louis Ave, Chicago, IL 60618 | MLS #10271435 | ZillowHere’s another $699K 4B/4Ba house, also in Albany Park: 4522 N Troy St, Chicago, IL 60625 | MLS #10257481 | ZillowJust a handful, but you get the idea — these listings are pretty representative of what Zillow returned. On your salary, even “just” $250K, you could comfortably afford a sizeable family home in Chicago. Not only that, but you’d have your pick of houses, apartments or condos pretty much anywhere in town you wanted to live. The choices are plenty and you could pick a property best suited to your lifestyle.Now let’s look at San Francisco. You could afford a house up to $1.125 million. We’ll set $800K as the lower bound and look for property with the same specs as what we saw in Chicago.Zillow returns five — 5 — properties in San Francisco in that price range, and some of them do look nice.Here’s a $999K 5B/3Ba house in Silver Terrace: 1921 Palou Ave, San Francisco, CA 94124 | MLS #480675 | ZillowHere’s an $899K 6B/5Ba house in Excelsior, which you can see needs a lot of extra work put into it: 531 Paris St, San Francisco, CA 94112 | MLS #40841285 | ZillowThat’s … pretty much it in San Francisco. I went a little lower in the price parameters and got … zero … results back. Branching out to Oakland returned few more options in the higher range, but not many, only a couple dozen. Fremont returned 33. But at a certain point, you’re no longer living in San Francisco and you’d need to account for commuting time and costs if you lived outside the city. And you’d be competing with other people for those same dozen or so houses, whereas in Chicago there’s enough housing stock available to not be too competitive.So that’s my input, probably meaningless though it is. The higher salary in San Francisco effectively evaporates when you look into housing costs, whereas the deceptively lower Chicago salary can get you much, much more in terms of quantity and quality, dollar for dollar. With a younger family, for me, housing (and in turn school and museum/cultural access) is what would be the driving factor for me. And there, Chicago wins. Easily.