As good as a link: How would you like to “co-brand” with Zillow?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to see something huge in the guise of something that might seem quite small at first?

Click here.

This is new software from Zillow.com. It’s supposed to go live at 9 pm PST, but it’s already working for me.

What’s different?

Look up in the upper left hand corner.

C’est moi! A photo of Odysseus. A link to my Zillow profile. A link to my email. My phone number. And a link to our brokerage’s weblog.

Even cooler is that button in the upper right hand corner:

A quick-click button to take you back to BloodhoundRealty.com.

So what’s going on here?

As of tonight, Zillow.com is “co-branding” with anyone who links to it. “Co-branding” is the kind of wine-and-cheese-PR-event deal big companies make with other big companies, but Zillow is extending the idea down to the lowliest of grunts-in-the-trenches.

(We can take a moment to snicker behind our hands. Trulia.com is building its reputation on being niggardly and hostile toward ordinary working real estate agents, so what better way to throw the whole issue into the starkest possible contrast? I don’t think Zillow approaches things this way, but the irony can’t be lost on them.)

Why does this matter? Because it’s a very reasonable response to an objection. If someone says, “Providing or promoting content on Zillow.com improves their garden but not your own,” Zillow can offer up the perfect counter: If you shed attention to us, we will make you our partner for that entire visit, and we will entreat your guest to return to you with every page that person views.

This is brilliant every way you think about it, and, of the wannabe Web 2.0 players in the real estate industry, Zillow seems to me to be the only one who really gets the whole bundle of Web 2.0 concepts: You give to get, wealth is abundant, the expectation of good behavior yields good behavior, etc.

There’s more. Zillow.com is about to introduce a ton of new widgets and gadgets, each one of which will be co-branded to the end-user. You’ll be able to post real-time mortgage quotes, for instance, and anything built with the Zillow API will be eligible for the program.

Zillow is also going to make performance-based badges available to Realtors and lenders — ranked by the number of contributions you have made to the site, I would presume — and these will also be co-branded.

What are they up to? They are rewarding you for linking to them and helping them build out their site. They are doing everything they can think of to “partner” with individual Realtors and lenders. I’ve written before that Zillow.com’s ambition is to become a net.institution like Ebay.com, Amazon.com or Wikipedia.com. This is one more step in that direction.

Not everything is sweetness and light. The Zestimate has become the favorite tool of scammers gulling thoughtless investors into thinking that there is a huge upside to be realized in lender-owned dumps. Because the Zestimate is a trailing indicator, in a declining market the Zestimate can be far higher than the actual market value of the home. I foresaw this abuse two years ago, but by now it is epidemic. Zillow is ripe with disclaimers now, where it was not in August of 2006, but fools abound.

Here’s an action item for people who are not fools: Every one of your links to Zillow, past, present and future is available for co-branding. All you have to do is add the code “/?scrnnm=YourZillowScreenName” to every link to Zillow. In other words, you can retroactively “co-brand” all your past links.

There is a sense in which this is a link-baiting strategy on Zillow’s part — and Zillow.com already has over two million Yahoo backlinks. But even looked at that way, it’s an amazingly generous gesture. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

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