There has been a ton of Zillow.com “news” lately, but mainly I’ve been ignoring it. News is news when it is something other than PR — free advertising for the company pushing the press release. In other words, what’s-in-it-for-me? — or for you or for anyone other than the owners of the company.
So:
- Zillow announces new listings from Big Bob’s Bait and Realty
- Zillow discovers newspapers don’t know what was planned for Hansel and Gretel
- After months of announcements, Zillow finally takes listings feeds
- Zillow announces even more new listings from multiple miscellaneous sources
- Zillow rapidly approaches a one-percent listings penetration; if you’re looking for a home, almost one out of hundred are now on-line!
Okayfine. I don’t care. The feed is a happening thing, but I said a long time ago they would have to have one, at which time they demurred. If they celebrate with a cupcake for each new brokerage they sign up, they may someday have to go to Costco once a week to buy more cupcakes. Good news for them. Not very interesting otherwise.
But then there’s this:
In addition, today Zillow is announcing its revolutionary Zillow Virtual Sold Sign program (VSS), to be added to Zillow Listings Feeds in the coming months. The VSS program allows a broker’s branding and contact information to permanently become part of a sold home’s Web page on Zillow, where four million people visit every month, 70 percent of whom are buying or selling in the next two years. The VSS functionality is free to all brokerages and Web vendors with Zillow Listings Feeds.
“Imagine having a permanent ‘sold by’ sign in front of every home a brokerage has ever sold — giving buyers and sellers a critical piece of information on who is selling homes in a neighborhood — today and over time,” said Rich Barton, Zillow co-founder and CEO. “Given Zillow’s focus on all homes — more than 70 million of them — and not just those on the market today, we are in a unique position to provide this historical sales information to buyers, sellers and homeowners.”
Now that’s interesting. If you list well in a particular neighborhood, Zillow will help you own it forever — for free.
That rocks. I would love to play with this toy — but I can’t. It doesn’t exist yet. Even so, this is the kind of thinking that sets Zillow.com miles apart from Realtor.com and its goofy kid brother, Trulia.com.
Think of it: When my listing sells, I will have peed on that particular tree forever. I’m curious what will happen if the house is listed and sold later by someone else, but, if anything, that’s just an added incentive to stay close with the people who buy our listings. In the neighborhoods where we are strong, we will just get stronger through time, as our presence becomes that much more palpable with each new sold listing.
I think these kinds of ideas flow from the Zillow design paradigm. To other Realty.bots, what matters is the listing, an ephemeral state-change in an otherwise uninteresting terrain. To Zillow, what matters is the house, and the record for each house it knows about is both permanent and infinitely extensible. Any additions made to the record for a particular house are incremental accretions to the Zillow asset base. Its goal is not to answer one question — “What’s for sale right now?” — but any question any user might come up with. This is a much closer expression of the data-is-the-new-Intel-inside idea than a normal listings portal.
There’s more at Zillow’s corporate weblog, and Rich Barton will be talking about this stuff later today at the NAR Convention.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology, Zillow.com
Eric Blackwell says:
Ummm…shouldn’t it be pee on your own electric fence? (grin) Since it is a third party bot, it is going to ZAP you in the end if you give the data out to it….
Coolness of the idea does not, in my book make the concept of Zillow worth doing…especially when they have neither dominance or relevance in many of today’s markets such as Louisville….
All real estate is of course local and your mileage may vary, but if they are NOT outranking you and they don’t have the eyeballs on their site looking SPECIFICALLY for your city, is an (admittedly) cool feature enough to make you a sell out? (rhetorical question we all have to answer…)
Thoughts?
November 14, 2007 — 10:21 am
DavidG from Zillow.com says:
Fantastic post, Greg – you have a great nose for innovation. And yes, I know how you feel about the other news. To answer your question, the Virtual Sold Sign remains until the home is re-listed. You’re right though that there are many interesting opportunities for this data.
Eric – Zillow’s a media company – we’re no more likely to “ZAP” Realtors than your local newspaper is. I’d hazard a guess that Zillow outranks your site for “whats my home worth” and most other generic real estate searches. We give you a platform for highly localized marketing to a massive audience of consumers searching for answers to their RE questions. Only a certain % of your potential clients will perform the loation specific real estate searches on google that I’m sure your site ranks very well for. The others will start with more generic searches or go directly to the sites of well known consumer real estate sites and communities like Zillow.
That said, our data in Louisville is far from comprehensive and I totally agree with your feedback about optimiIng your online marketing – even real estate on the web is local – you’ll know that our coverage has improved in KY when you start to get questions about Zestimates from clients.
November 14, 2007 — 11:13 am
Greg Swann says:
I thought I had you today, David, stuck on the clueplane.
The essence of findability, IMO, is being there to be found wherever people happen to be looking. If an out-of-state investor wants to list his home in one of our pet neighborhoods, right now he has no way of knowing how strong we are. The neighbors know, but anyone who is not seeing the custom signs — and the sold signs — cannot know about us. A Virtual Sold Sign is all bonus for the Realtor on the ground.
A few weeks ago I gave away an even more compelling free idea for marketing on Zillow, but nobody picked up on it.
Will days-listed-for-sale-on-Zillow be reflected in the Virtual Sold Sign? If so, that’s an incentive for agents to keep their listings up to date.
IAC, I think this is a sweet idea.
November 14, 2007 — 11:20 am
San Diego says:
Finally something I like about Zillow.
November 14, 2007 — 12:39 pm
Doug Quance says:
Yes, this is a good idea. It might not be a perfect idea… but few ideas are.
I like it.
November 14, 2007 — 12:57 pm
Eric Blackwell says:
@DavidG–hey, hows it going? You are spot on with the comparison to our local paper’s website…ummm…yeah…they are our competitor too! (IMHO) They charge the REALTORS of our office thousands to advetise on THEIR site. So yeah…we give them our data and then they post in their site, and then when revenue models change…ZAP…electric fence.
That having been said, I think this was / is a COOL innovation. I am looking forward to seeing it go live…
Best
Eric
November 14, 2007 — 2:10 pm
Thomas Johnson says:
Warming up my ZESTIFARM tractor!
TJ
November 15, 2007 — 8:19 am
John Slimak says:
Great Post,
As a nontraditional broker I am always looking for an edge to the “Mad Cow” traditional brokers stuck on that “Realtor.com Rules” mentality. I have been watching Zillow on every new develop as to the items that could benefit me today. It will be a matter of time before the Mad Cowers get together in fear of Zillow because every step they take the local Board of REALTORS take two steps back!
November 16, 2007 — 6:25 pm