Victoria K.

I purchased my home in 2002 and have been living in the same house since then. I recently decided to look up previous sales on my home and came across an erroneous sale on my home in 2011 on Trulia and Zillow. I contacted both Zillow and Trulia, and Zillow immediately took down the sale after checking with our local county records. Trulia, well that was a very different experience. I was told by Trulia customer service that "these pieces of data are collected and aggregated by these third party data providers through bulk batches containing millions of data points at one time." They don't enter, edit or update any of the information on their site nor do they know who these third party data providers are. This is scary because anyone can enter a bogus sale for your home or mistakenly apply a real sale to the wrong house on some site, and it could appear on Trulia. The sad news is that you can't ever fix it because Trulia can't track where the data comes from. The sale could be less than half of what your house is worth and bring down your home's and neighborhood's value - which is what happened to us. Now, they cannot remove this fictitious sale on my house. This site should be taken down until they get their house in order. They are sharing information that is readily available to the public about private properties and their data should be pristine. They should absolutely know where their data comes from, be able to track the source of every data element on their site, and have a process for removing inaccurate information ASAP.
I would urge all property owners to check your property's information on Trulia to ensure you don't run into issues when selling or refinancing your home.