Recently Sold Homes on Zillow: How and When Do They Appear?

We’re asked questions about how Zillow works every day, but one of the most frequently-asked has to do with recently sold homes, and how long it takes for the sale of a home to appear on Zillow. As users of the site know, recent sales appear as little yellow icons on our maps, and you can see them under “Nearby Similar Sales” on any Home Details Page. Information about recently sold homes is incredibly valuable to buyers or sellers trying to find out what homes in a certain neighborhood are selling for, and they play a major part in determining and updating Zestimates multiple times a week.

So it’s important to understand how and when information about recently sold homes appears on Zillow. We actually get this from a couple different sources.

The first is agents with listings on Zillow. When an agent sells a home and takes that listing off Zillow, they’re prompted to give the sale price. This can happen the day of closing.

The second way we get information about recently sold homes is through public records. How long it takes from the recording of a deed to the date the information appears on our site depends on the region, but in June it took a median of 23 days nationwide. In some places, like our homebase of King County, Wash., where the information is processed very quickly, we can have public records data in our database within a week.

Something else that’s important to point out is that, since Zillow gets information about recently sold homes from both agents and from public records, we have a very complete set of recent sale prices. About 15 percent of all sales nationwide are not listed through a Multiple Listing Service; they’re either listed as for sale by owner (FSBO), or are pocket listings (listings that never make it to the MLS). Via public records data, we’re therefore able to list all sales among our recenty-sold homes.  Additionally, our live for-sale listings (3.6 million of them today) come from owners, agents and feed partnerships with brokerages and MLS’s - so they include a broad range of homes for sale by agents and by owners.