If you’re a working Realtor, Zillow.com’s Virtual Sold Sign technology is another weapon you can deploy in your guerrilla marketing strategy.
I raved about this when it was announced, but now the feature has finally gone live.
What’s a Virtual Sold Sign? If you were the the listing agent the last time a particular home sold, Zillow will associate that home’s record with your Zillow profile, noting that the homes was “last sold by” — you.
Because Zillow has a database of almost all of the homes in the country, we have the unique opportunity to provide this feature. Traditional listings sites just take a listing down once the transaction is complete, but we have over 4 million visitors coming to Zillow and viewing millions of recently sold homes each month. In fact, over 35 million homes have been viewed on Zillow since we launched. In some cities (Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, among others), over 90% of ALL homes in those cities have been viewed on Zillow. Your sold homes are already getting viewed a lot on Zillow, with (until now) nothing to distinguish them as your sold homes.
The VSS program allows agents and brokers to continue marketing themselves on their sold properties for free, long after the home has actually sold. Past transactions can even be submitted, to get attribution for listings that [sold] long before the Zillow Listings Feed program was even started. It’s like leaving the “sold” sign up in the yard of each and every home you’ve ever sold.
Aside from the obvious benefit to agents and brokerages, the VSS program is beneficial to prospective sellers, and even buyers to find out who the top agents and brokerages are in their neighborhood, or the neighborhood where they want to move.
This is another piece of the marketing strategy that Brian Brady, myself and others have been working on, but which Tom Johnson has given the sizzling sobriquet “ZestiFarming.” Not to get too unhinged on the Unchained promises, but I’ll be teaching two hours of ZestiFarming techniques to enable you to completely dominate a geographic listing farm.
And this is also another demonstration of why Zillow’s design paradigm — a permanent database of houses, not a transient database of for-sale listings — is so much better for actual grunts on the ground — rather than for their brokers. This is my take on the Virtual Sold Sign idea last November:
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.
You gotta sign up to play this game, so go register yourself at Zillow’s feed site so you can claim all your sold listings.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology, Zillow.com
Allen Butler says:
Sounds fabulous, but looks kinda complex. Are you gonna tell us how to create a “feed?” Looked at their spec sheet, and am totally lost.
February 21, 2008 — 9:54 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Are you gonna tell us how to create a “feed?”
Wait for me. I looked at the specs when they were announced, then put it off. We’re listing almost not at all right now — our mantra is “Don’t lose money” — so I haven’t worried about automated feeds. But I have code that I wrote for Trulia’s feed that will produce XML from one of the downloadable formats on ARMLS. If it seems needful, I’ll revise it for Zillow. My guess, though, is that it’s going to be faster and easier to do Virtual Sold Signs manually — unless you’re Russell Shaw.
February 21, 2008 — 10:17 pm
Dustin says:
Doesn’t look like you can do virtual solds manually. You have to sign up for an automatic feed to see more about virtual solds. Unless I am wrong or they change it but i couldn’t see how to do it.
February 23, 2008 — 1:22 am
Greg Swann says:
I signed up to see what’s needed. If it can’t done manually, the XML will be very simple, since almost nothing will need to be detailed. If I have to, I’ll work out a way to do it pseudo-manually, with a form or something, and make that available. XML itself is just unsightly, not complicated.
February 23, 2008 — 7:34 am