Zillow.com is getting ready to get ready to take listings data feeds. The X in XML stands for eXtensible, but Zillow and dynamism sleep at opposite ends of the bed. In any case, if you ready to get started getting ready to go, Zillow is prepared to think about undertaking those last few items of preparation. If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail, but what happens if you fail to plan (to plan (to plan (to plan (…))))? It’s a problem. As the Melancholy Dane advises, “Get thee to a vomitoria!” When it comes to lunch and data feeds, “a double blessing is a double grace,” so to speak.
I haven’t looked at the specs yet, but I have PHP for feeds into Trulia, PropSmart and ZeeMaps. If your broker won’t support you, it may be I can help.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
David G says:
Hi Greg,
A fair enough jibe. We won’t pick and choose which XML to feed on and are merely setting expectations for the initial effort it may take to digest some feeds. I’m sure that our confidence with that will scale quickly once initial submissions have been passed all the way through the new system. The airtime this issue is getting reflects the importance we’re giving it and our awareness of the effort our partners may have to schedule technical work to integrate with Zillow.
When you do review the spec, you should have very little left to do since you already feed listings to Trulia.
September 11, 2007 — 3:02 pm
Kris Berg says:
Oh, crap. Et tu, Brute? David – I warned Drew about this at Inman in SF. The problem for me is this – I currently place all of my listings on Zillow, and I pay for the occassional EZ Ad. When you start accepting Broker feeds, my Broker’s feed will trump my own, thereby eclipsing my personal marketing efforts (link to my own website, for instance). I am not feeling the love.
Don’t get me wrong – I am proud of my affiliation with my Broker, but every Broker feed dilutes my own brand and effectiveness. My feeds become eight-sixed slag, since you obviously can’t allow duplicate postings, and you obviously can’t favor an individual agent over a big, powerful company. I know why you are going this route, but from a business standpoint, I think a lot of people have enjoyed your every-man renegade schtick. If your goal is to become Trulia-with-a-Zestimate, then this will work. If you want to endear yourself to the individual agents, this may backfire.
I’m still thoroughly enjoying the Beer Glasses, however. Send more! 🙂
September 11, 2007 — 8:47 pm
David G says:
Hi Kris,
“T-with-a-Z” is not the goal (very funny.)
The people who use our site want to know who the listing agent is, they want to ask them questions about the listing and have the agent or owner post rich details about the home. So, your participation is important to the experience buyers and sellers have on Zillow and that doesn’t change. Our goal here is to take the work out of manually posting listings. Since we added listings to Zillow, feeds have been the most common suggestion requested by early adopters.
We require the listing agents’ contact e-mail address in the feed and won’t post listings that exclude that data field. We then use that address to automatically associate your listings with your Zillow profile (provided the same e-mail is used for both.)
If your broker sends an email address that we don’t recognize we will have a solution to associate your listings with your Zillow profile. Additionally, if you manually post your listings to Zillow before they are fed to us, the feed will not trump your posting.
I recommend that you speak with your broker about the importance of sending us your Zillow-registered email address with your listing. For example; only the listing agent can accurately answer some of the questions that are raised by buyers using Home Q&A.
September 12, 2007 — 8:04 am
Kris Berg says:
Thanks, David. That was helpful.
September 12, 2007 — 12:10 pm