The news is not that Zillow is going to have agents. It’s going to have newbies for agents.

Housing Wire:

A Zillow spokesperson told HousingWire that these people are already employed with Zillow, and will be getting real estate licenses. Zillow said it will not be recruiting for these positions.

It’s a boiler-room job – in the same article, George Laughton says Zillow still won’t be getting its hands dirty. But boiler-room selling and legally-compliant real estate brokerage are two different things.

Whatever. This morning I wrote this to my favorite pricing algorithm, soon to be disintermediated by exuberant, clueless college grads:

Of course this was the plan all along. The funny part? They think they’ve lived through a downturn with Coronavirus. Now they get to play catch-a-falling-knife with their own inventory.

The press release reads like they think the local brokers, like Laughton, are hoarding all the good leads from the failures and fallouts. I hope that’s the reason, just because it’s extra stupid.

Note that the 18 or so local brokers who were not screwed today now know what they have coming.

All of the iBuyers working in Phoenix suck at resale marketing. They make bone-headed marketing errors, common to many poor listers, but they make them by the hundreds. Pulling even more of that work in-house, when Zillow is so bad at it, seems daft – even absent the opportunity to make thousands upon thousands of regulatory infractions.

Prove me wrong, Zillow? You look like nothing but dead money to me.