People searching for newly constructed homes on the popular Zillow and Trulia websites are not likely to find all the places that are available.

Zillow bills itself as “the largest, most trusted and vibrant home-related marketplace in the world.” But in early 2016, the Seattle-based company quietly stopped publishing listings from some of the country’s largest builders unless it was paid by the builders to add them.

Zillow, which owns Trulia, has contracts with most of the country’s 700-plus multiple listing services (MLS), agreeing to post every house listed by realty agents and entered into an MLS, whether resale or new construction. As long as agents opt in, their MLS listings will be sent to Zillow.

But the company has reversed course when it comes to new homes, saying that builders that sell more than 150 houses a year have to enter their listings directly with the site as part of its Promoted Communities program.

The company maintains that its motives were pure, in that would-be buyers craved more information about new communities and neighborhoods than what was available from the local MLS. By entering their offerings directly, builders could include as much information as they wanted -- for example, floor plans, community amenities and lot availability.

“We launched with the consumer in mind,” said Vice President of Builder Sales Lucy Wohltman, “allowing them to discover new construction listings more easily and earlier than ever before.”

But the policy change also became another revenue stream for the company. Most builders don’t put up anywhere near 150 houses a year, but many do. And by charging them $500 per subdivision per month to have those houses listed, Zillow stands to rake in millions for something it was once doing without charging builders anything.

The company won’t release the number of builder participants, or how much it earns from the program, but Wohltman says some 10,000 communities are displayed on the site.

Most builders contacted for this article refused to talk about the Zillow initiative, opting to sidestep any controversy. There is good reason to stay on the company’s good side: Most homebuyers today start their search online, and Zillow is a go-to site. Most builders seem to have capitulated to Zillow’s effort to squeeze money out of them.

But some builders have balked. Beazer Homes -- the 11th largest, according to trade publication Builder -- has said no, arguing that it has enough leads coming in from other sources.

The numbers tell the dissidents’ story. A builder who operates in, say, 12 different communities would pay Zillow $6,000 a month to list its houses. That kind of money puts a severe crimp in marketing budgets, or else becomes a cost passed on to buyers.

According to the National Association of Home Builders, only 8 percent of all builders sell more than 100 houses annually. Zillow asserts its program impacts “less than 10 percent” of the builders on its site.

But Texas-based Ben Caballero of HomesUSA finds that claim somewhat suspect. Pointing out that 10 percent of the country’s nearly 50,000 homebuilders erect some 90 percent of all houses, he says the change is nothing more than a “pay for play” ploy on Zillow’s part.

Caballero works with more than 60 Lone Star State builders. He lists their houses in their local MLSs, and when a client sells a house, he is credited as the listing agent. At last count, he found that 27 of his builder-clients in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and three in Houston, had refused to list directly with Zillow. Together, they build in 369 different communities. Two more clients have canceled their subscriptions to the initiative, and one is “on pause.”

Caballero has no quarrel with Zillow’s desire to provide consumers with more information. But he is angry about how the company went about the initiative. He didn’t find out about the program until one of his builder-clients called to ask why his houses weren’t listed.

“Zillow didn’t tell anyone -- not brokers and not the MLSs,” Caballero said in an interview. “They did it covertly. Only builders were told listings would be taken down” unless Zillow was paid directly.

“I don’t understand why they were so clandestine about it,” he added. “I have been telling my clients that when they list through me, their houses will be seen on all aggregation sites such as Zillow and Realtor.com. So I have been inadvertently misleading them because I was unaware of the change.”

Caballero isn’t the only one angry at Zillow; so is Georgia’s Kendall Butler of FLI Properties. She wasn’t told about the program, either, and only found out about it when the leads she had been receiving from Zillow slowed to a trickle.

Butler checked and discovered that Zillow had taken down listings from all three of the builders she represents, even though only one met the 150-home threshold. “They removed all my builders’ listings without telling us,” she said. “I called five times and I never heard back.”

The agent sees the program as a “money grab” that goes against two of Zillow’s claimed core values: transparency and putting the consumer first. None of her builders see the value in the program, she said, so they now have no listings on either Zillow or Trulia.

“They tried to force them in by removing all their listings. It seems like blackmail to me,” Butler said.

Zillow’s Wohltman said she “wouldn’t use the word ‘pushback’” to describe these grievances, adding that “it’s more like ‘confusion’” on the part of naysayers. “Builders can still publish their listings through their MLSs, but they will be buried (among listings for resale houses) if they don’t come through the paid platform,” she said.

Caballero said he contacted four MLSs in Texas, questioning “whether they had a unilateral right not to push (listings) through to Zillow,” he said. “But they said they had nondisclosure agreements with Zillow and couldn’t comment.”

Caballero also maintains that Zillow is haphazard when it comes to listings -- publishing some, but not all, builders’ offerings. One of his clients says the site lists 45 of his houses for sale, but not 27 others, and incorrectly lists 40 as “not for sale.”

Faster is often better -- but not always.

Modern technology has vastly shortened the time it takes to qualify for a mortgage and close on a home. The internet continues to streamline the real estate process with new programs that improve efficiency at a blistering rate. But there are still some real estate transactions where speed can cause an uncomfortable squeeze.

The need for speed is everywhere in real estate and finance these days. Quicken Loans’ Rocket Mortgage, for instance, advertises a loan approval in minutes. And the length of time houses are on the market gets shorter and shorter every year.

But does all that speed leave enough time for buyers to do what they need to do?

First, let’s look at the ever-shortening time spans.

According to real estate company Zillow, last year saw the fastest pace ever for house sales. A typical abode was on the market for just 81 days, with many markets coming in much quicker than that: 41 days in San Jose, for example, and 43 in San Francisco.

Ever-more sophisticated technology has helped speed things up, but the acceleration has mainly been caused by hyper-hot housing markets, where decent houses for sale are few and far between.

According to Zillow, “the fastest-selling month on record was June 2017, when the median valued home took 73 days to sell, including closing.”

“Tight inventory accounts for much of the crunch,” the firm reports. “The number of homes for sale has fallen on a year-over-year basis for 37 consecutive months, leaving fewer options for buyers -- which contributes to higher prices.”

Many people in the real estate business are happy that things are speeding up so rapidly. Jonathan Corr, president and chief executive of mortgage software firm Ellie Mae, thinks the efforts of tech firms like his may shrink homebuying timelines even more.

Zillow pegs the average homebuying transaction as taking four to six weeks from contract to closing, but Corr says it could soon be even faster. He notes, “If you’re a consumer, you want the process to be shorter.”

No doubt sellers and real estate professionals are happy to be getting their money quicker. And borrowers refinancing their loans want to see their transactions close ASAP so they can lower their rates or tap into their equity right away.

But what about folks who are selling one home and buying another? Or merging two households into one?

They can usually only move so fast, no matter how quickly the lender is ready to hand over the money. And if they can’t get everything done in time, everyone else is stuck in neutral.

Until technology vendors devise an electronic way to physically move possessions from one home to another, for example, buyers are going to have to make their moves the old-fashioned way. And that can take time. Atlas Van Lines, for instance, recommends allowing two months to execute a move properly.

The company’s list of the myriad details involved can be a little daunting. Its recommended tasks begin two months before moving day, and cover everything from measuring furniture to be sure it fits in the new place, to

turning utilities off in the old home and on in the new. You’ll also need to make arrangements for pets, get your deposit back if you’re a renter, and on and on.

In other words, most moves take time.

Still, technology doesn’t have to be the bad guy, squeezing you into an uncomfortably quick move, according to Joe Tyrrell, Ellie Mae’s executive vice president of corporate strategy. For one thing, it can help your lender be more efficient in ways that will benefit you.

Most lenders sell their loans off to investors in the secondary market, and the numerous investors who buy loans all tend to have different requirements. While that doesn’t seem to matter on the consumer side, buyers may be annoyed if they are required to fill out extra documents before closing because your lender switched to a different investor. But Ellie Mae, among others, has software that can remove that irritant.

Another Ellie Mae program makes for a more pleasant borrowing experience: It analyzes applicants’ behavior and predicts when they are most likely to initiate contact with their lenders. That way, lenders can make sure they are available at those particular times.

“This lifts (borrower) confidence, and fewer loans fall out of the pipeline,” Tyrrell says. “There are plenty of competitors in the mortgage space. If it’s not high-tech, people will go someplace else.”

-- Freelance writer Mark Fogarty contributed to this report.

Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac helped “save” more than 68,000 borrowers from foreclosure in this year’s first quarter by modifying their loans so the payments are more affordable.

That brings their total foreclosure preventions to more than 4.1 million, and drops the two companies’ rate of seriously delinquent homeowners to 1.1 percent as of the end of March, according to government reports. Hey, you can’t help everybody.

But according to another report from a well-respected real estate analyst, you sometimes can’t even help those you’ve already helped. That’s not a riddle. Rather, it describes the rate of recidivism, or the folks who lose their homes anyway, no matter how much assistance they are given.

An investigation by analyst Keith Jurow found “compelling evidence that a large and growing percentage” of owners are re-defaulting on their loans.

“Once, twice, even three times,” he said. “The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that modifications, as an alternative to foreclosures, have been a massive failure.”

Jurow told me in an interview that “the numbers are mind-boggling.” Consider these figures, which he offered in his column in the “Advisor Perspectives” newsletter:

In the last half of 2012, 24 percent of borrowers who received a loan-mod from Fannie Mae had re-defaulted within a year. By last year’s fourth quarter, 37 percent had re-defaulted. Even worse, 30 percent who received a modification in 2017 re-defaulted within 90 days. Ninety days!

Hope Now, a consortium of government-approved counseling agents -- companies that service home loans, investors and other mortgage market participants -- counts a total of 8.4 million mortgage modifications since 2007. This includes mods made under the federal HAMP modification program begun in 2009, proprietary mods made directly by lenders, and Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s own mod programs.

In most cases, permanent changes to an original mortgage are made by reducing the interest rate, stretching the loan term, adding unpaid interest to the principal still owed or reducing the amount owed. In other instances, temporary changes such as a reduction or deferment of the scheduled payment are made until the borrower gets back on his or her financial feet.

Because the temporary solutions don’t change the terms of the original loan, they are not reported under regular modification data. However, under the heading “other workout plans,” Hope Now says there have been 16.4 million temporary mods.

In all cases, all borrowers who have received a modification are considered current. Thus, the delinquency and foreclosure figures reported by trade groups and the government are highly misleading.

Loan-mods were seen as a critical part of the solution to help troubled borrowers avoid losing their homes. “If millions of delinquent mortgages could be modified, this would drastically reduce the number of homes that would have to be repossessed,” says Jurow.

But the result was far different, he says. Instead of solving the problem, it only “succeeded in artificially pushing up home prices and fooling everyone into thinking that the worst is over.”

Here’s what Jurow calls “the really shocking number”: By 2015, one-third of new loan-mods were on mortgages previously modified and whose borrowers had defaulted again. And the problem is not limited to Fannie Mae, which the analyst says is carrying $144 billion worth of mortgages it believes are uncollectible.

A 2014 review of loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) found that nearly 3.3 million had been modified. But about 57 percent of those borrowers had already re-defaulted, according to Jurow’s report. Another review found that of the FHA loans that had been modified, nearly 60 percent re-defaulted within 36 months.

“The FHA default rate is the worst,” Jurow said.

Some of the nation’s largest banks are in the same boat. At Bank of America, the re-default rate on “troubled debt restructurings” is 45 percent. At PNC, it’s 57 percent. At Wells Fargo, it’s 35 percent.

These and other lenders, loan servicers and Fannie and Freddie “have been able to pull off this charade because hardly anyone knows how bad the re-default situation really is,” Jurow said. “Even mortgage pros don’t really know that there is a problem. How could they? The re-default numbers ... have been buried where few people can find them.”

“It’s hard to get good data,” he said. “They hide it. I really had to dig.”

Jurow’s worrisome analysis is meant to be a warning to mortgage investors and their advisers, who he says “don’t have a clue.”

“There’s only one plausible conclusion we can draw from these worsening numbers,” he says. “Mortgage modification has failed as a solution to the mortgage delinquency problem. Millions of borrowers continue to become delinquent regardless of their financial situation.”

But there’s a message here for borrowers, too: When considering a modification, make reasonably sure that you can fix your financial situation and avoid getting into trouble again. Otherwise, you are only delaying the inevitable. And it could cost you dearly.

For the rest of us, beware. The market in your area may not be as strong as you suspect.

The foreclosure crisis has not gone away. Eventually, lenders and investors have to come down on these serial defaulters.

They haven’t yet, Jurow speculates, because there are so many of them that it could throw the housing sector into another free-fall. But if and when they do, it could impact the value of your own home.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that this is going to end badly,” the analyst said. “It’s like a ticking time bomb. Sooner or later it’s going to explode. You can only kick the can down the road for so long.”