Zillow.com’s latest release me-too’s Trulia.com’s recent me-too release: Can either make the leap from ghost-town to community?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

With its Z6 software release, which goes live tonight, Zillow.com adds a neighborhood level of user conversations, similar to Trulia.com’s Trulia Voices feature released in May of this year.

From Zillow’s press release:

Real estate Web site Zillow.com today added a number of new community features, opening up the site even further to user contributions. Chief among these additions are individual neighborhood pages in more than 130 U.S. cities (more than 6,500 neighborhoods in all). The pages are seeded with rich local demographic and real estate information, but are built for communities and neighbors to make their own. Anyone within a community has the ability to add photos, events, local news, engage in discussions and ask or answer questions about neighborhood real estate.

“Adding the ability for neighbors to meet, share information and learn about their local neighborhood is a natural next step for Zillow. We started with individual Web pages and Home Q&A for more than 70 million homes, and today we’re bringing the conversation out to the neighborhood level,” said Lloyd Frink, Zillow president. “In the offline world, conversations happen all the time around homes, neighborhoods and communities. With these additions, we’re adding the data, tools and a platform for these conversations to thrive online — and help people become smarter about real estate, for free, in the process.”

Neighborhoods are accessed from any of the 70 million Home Details pages within Zillow, or via the “local real estate” link at the bottom of every Zillow page.

There’s more, but we’ll come back to it.

First: Is this a surprise to anyone? The new features were accidentally pre-announced last week in an inadvertently transmitted email. I understood the portent of that email, as I’m sure did everyone else in the RE.net who got it: Responding to Trulia was Zillow’s obvious next move, and they’re fairly steady at doing major upgrades once a quarter. The only real surprise was that the hermetically-sealed start-up actually leaked something.

But could it be that Zillow and Trulia are stuck in a tennis volley of answering each other’s features? Truila Voices was the loud claim from the San Francisco Realty.bot in May. The whispered claim was, “And we have tax records on houses, too.” The latter assertion was whispered because it was false in some measure at the time, although I expect it becomes steadily more true as records are scooped up county by county. Even with the same inventory Zillow claims, Trulia would not have a comparable database of individual homes, but the contest can be seen from the consumer’s point of view as a battle of bullet-points.

So Trulia says, “Individual homes, yeah, we’ve got those.” And Zillow responds, “Community conversations? Will 6,500 be enough?”

Here’s what’s intriguing to me, at the risk of being served up as ground Bloodhound in a flak-catcher sandwich: Do either one of these two wannabe real estate portals have anything like the kind of sticky Wiki-Ebay-Amazonian loyalty that I believe to be Zillow’s goal, at least?

Traffic? Nothing to sneeze at. Listings? Not so much. Conversations? Ho. Hum. Raving, craving, wheezing, sneezing can’t-get-enough-of-that-Realty.bot-stuff fans? I’m not seeing it, not at either site. Perhaps it means nothing, but Zillow.com no longer promotes its current stats on its front page.

What does it all mean? I’m thinking it’s not working. Not that each site is not cool in its own way, but that neither is compelling to end-users in that sticky Wiki-Ebay-Amazonian way. Utility? Yes. Obsession? No.

So consider the other two features announced in tonight’s upgrade:

• Zillow Discussions — a forum-type feature providing Zillow community members a place to talk about real estate-related topics on a national level. This is a place for broader topics such as real estate investing, hiring an agent or discussing the best way to stage a home.
• Polls — this fun addition gives any Zillow user the opportunity to create a survey on any topic and post it at the national or ZIP code level. The Zillow community can vote and see immediate results — whether the question focuses on the best restaurant in a certain neighborhood, or speculates what the national average home price will be in 2012. These polls show up on neighborhood pages, city pages and all discussion pages throughout the site.

“Zillow Discussions” I anticipated, but I thought it would come in the form of mini-blogs, like ActiveRain. Realtors are apt to be the most active discussants in these exchanges, so I thought it would be well for them to be able to control the conversation. The forum style of community works well with people who develop a strong affinity — or enmity — for each other by being fascinated by the forum’s topic. In other words, this probably will only work as an emergent phenomenon: If the participants engender their own need to sustain a community, it will work, not if not.

The “Polls” feature is right on the verge of being a drive-time radio stunt, like a smash-hit-or-trash-it record rating extravaganza. Zillow.com is in the advertising business, so, in a certain sense, I am obliged to review it as infotainment. On that basis, national do-it-yourself real estate polling seems to reek of desperation. I write this without having seen the new software, so it could be more dignified than I am imagining. But for now at least, this seems like flailing at stickiness: Anything to get them to keep coming back.

What’s missing, at least for now? Nothing that I can see of the hinted-at feature for mortgage lenders. And no mention of listings feeds.

Meanwhile, here’s a new feature that feels like home to me:

Additionally, the Zillow home page is now personalized for users who have registered or searched the site in the past — focusing on their home neighborhood, city or most recent search area. The personalized home page includes geographically targeted data such as local homes for sale, Make Me Move homes and area Home Q&A. A new “My Snapshot” box also has details tracking an individual’s participation on the site, including the number of questions asked and answered, or homes posted for sale.

This is all just cookie stuff, wicked simple, but this is what cookies are for. At least half of being delightful consists of not being annoying. Whether being less annoying to returning users will make them return more often, doing more while they’re on the site, remains to be seen. But it’s a move in the right direction.

You could argue that Zillow is moving away from the idea of real estate — a transacted commodity, which implies a short window of close attention — and toward something else. The logical something else is homeownership, an enduring status. Community chatting, discussion fora and — god help me — polling-for-fun may not be the ideal way of getting self-identified homeowners to stick around.

Here’s my take: I don’t think any of this is working so far, not at Trulia.com and not at Zillow.com. I still see Zillow as the stronger overall candidate, but this release — half me-too!, half what-else-can-we-do? — argues to me that neither of these two Realty.bots has come up with a reliable formula for producing that sticky Wiki-Ebay-Amazonian loyalty that will result in a true category-killer. I think both sites are essentially ghost-towns for now, replete with absolutely everything it takes to make a town except people. It remains to be seen if either of them can grow to become true self-sustaining communities of fiercely loyal users.

More: John Cook’s Venture Blog, Drew Meyers, Zillow Blog, The Real Estate Bloggers, Realivent, VC Ratings, Online Media Cultist, Future of Real Estate Marketing, Matthew Ingram.

Still more: Further thoughts on Zillow.com and community.

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