I think I have to back off — for now, at least — from my earlier expectations for Zillow.com as an incipient National Property Listings Service. To this date, anyway, Zillow’s appeal to sellers and listing agents has been underwhelming, at best. As I write, there are 19,250 homes listed for sale on the system. An additional 10,381 are listed under the “Make Me Move” option. By contrast, at the time that Zillow.com released these changes to its software, Trulia.com announced that it had achieved one million on-line listings.
At that time, I had written Trulia and other on-line listings aggregators off as dinosaurs, and I still believe this is true. But if Zillow.com represents the coming of the mammals, the first mammalian species to have evolved must have been the sloth.
What’s the problem?
No XML feed.
When these software upgrades were made, Galen Ward speculated that Zillow had skipped the feed to capture agents’ eyeballs for its advertising. If this is the actual reason Zillow elected not to permit listing by XML feed — as is done by the other Realty.bot listings aggregators — then the strategy has backfired.
Whatever Zillow’s reason not to have a feed, that reason is wrong. In making these changes, Zillow.com voluntarily surrendered the fearsome mojo of it’s Delphic Automated Valuation Method. Overnight, it transformed itself from every Realtor’s favorite bette noir to… just another listings bot. And as exciting as it might be as a listings bot, it’s but one more of what are already too many listings bots — and the only one of the bunch that can’t be fed from PostLets or vFlyer or one of many proprietary Realtor web site vendors.
That is: It went from being potentially threatening to Realtors but fundamentally useless to potentially useful but fundamentally a pain in the ass to Realtors.
This turns out not to have been an improvement, especially as Zillow.com prepares to roll out an advertising product targeted to Realtors. Zillow.com has always been able to deliver potential sellers — even as it delivers wildly inaccurate Zestimates to them. But without a significant number of homes listed for sale, Zillow.com will not attract potential buyers.
That’s a chicken-and-egg problem, but it’s one that is easily solved: Create an XML feed format that is readily regurgitated by the PostLets and vFlyers of the world. If Zillow wants to do something much more elegant for major brokers and MLS/IDX systems, that’s great. But it makes absolutely no sense for Zillow.com to have records on 67 million homes and listings for fewer than 20,000 of them…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Dave Barnes says:
Greg,
I, for one, think the “Make Me Move” thing is silly. I did for my house because I wanted to “claim” my property. I set the MMM price at $1.6M USD which is 2x the current appraisal. If someone shows up tomorrow with a check for 1.6, then we are moving–as much as we love our house.
So, I think the MMM quantity is meaningless.
,dave
January 9, 2007 — 7:53 pm
Athol Kay says:
I expectted more listings on Zillow too. Still it’s still an interesting port of call when looking at a house.
January 9, 2007 — 8:04 pm
Marlow says:
Zillow is a member of the MLS in our state and could, theoretically, have a public feed. If they did though, using their brokerage, they could not sell outside ads. If they wanted to have a feed AND sell ads, then the feed would come through whatever brokerage they licensed through and each listing lead would go to that particular brokerage. Something like what Yahoo Real Estate does. In this State, Yahoo uses Prudential’s feed and leads go to Prudential, but they also can sell banner ads to XYZ brokerage right along side the feed. That’s probably what Zillow should/will do to maximize their usefulness and profitability.
I’d be interested in knowing the MLS rules in other states and if they’ve joined NAR in order to join some of the other MLS’s. In our state, NAR membership is not mandatory to access our MLS.
January 9, 2007 — 9:55 pm
jf.sellsius says:
You speaketh zillow truth, Greg.
January 9, 2007 — 11:12 pm
John says:
>”Something like what Yahoo Real Estate does. In this State, Yahoo uses Prudential’s feed and leads go to Prudential, but they also can sell banner ads to XYZ brokerage right along side the feed.”
Marlow, Yahoo Real Estate does not serve banner ads next to Prudential’s MLS feeds. That would be a violation of most/all MLS’ rules.
January 10, 2007 — 8:23 am
Jay Thompson says:
Entering 15 listings ONE BY ONE into Zillow is a PITA. I can’t imagine a brokerage/agent that has to enter more.
I caved after the first one. Now if I could dump the feed from my site into Zillow, they’d all be in there right now. As it is, they’ll get input (maybe) during some free time, whenever that may occur.
I too put a “Make Me Move” price on my house. And trust me, if someone offers that price, I’ll be out by midnight.
January 10, 2007 — 9:27 am
Kevin Boer says:
I have to believe they have plans for bulk uploading listings — it’s the only logical way to get critical mass. I also have to believe they have no plans of getting the listings themselves from whatever MLS’s they happen to be members of since that would tie them up in so many different ways.
January 10, 2007 — 4:12 pm
David G from Zillow.com says:
Hi, it’s David G from Zillow.com.
First, thank you all for your feedback. It’s still day one for posting homes on Zillow, so we’re listening intently and iterating as we go — comments like Jay’s definitely make us think. Thank you for your candor.
I do want to address a few of the points that Greg made. Most importantly, I disagree that this is a chicken-and-egg situation. Home buyers are already on Zillow; they’re researching local Zestimates. Now it’s simply up to each Realtor to decide whether those buyers should see their listings and contact details on our site.
Very early analysis shows that homes posted for sale on Zillow already get more than 100X the attention that the average house on the site does. So, the answer to “why should I post my listings on Zillow” is absolutely that buyers are already on the site — and they’re interested in the listings that they’re finding there.
So, hopefully I’ve made the point that the eggs are there but it’s still fair to ask; “where are the rest of the chickens?” The answer to that question lies more in sociology than technology: an absolute truth of internet products is that they’re slowly adopted, especially initially. I saw this play out many times at Amazon and again now at Zillow. Internet users adopt new features (especially interactive ones) at their own pace. That’s a large part of why sites like Amazon and Zillow don’t (pay to) advertise new features; because no amount of awareness can cause a site’s visitors to use a new feature. It’s not that owners and agents won’t post their listings on Zillow, it’s merely that most of them haven’t yet … and that’s OK. All grass-roots web initiatives start out this way.
Greg, I’m also going to take exception with the “listings bot” moniker. Listings bots robotically scrape and suck listing content from various online sources with little regard for authority or accuracy. This practice results in the listings quality challenge that was apparently the topic dujour at Inman’s recent Connect conference. Unlike bots, Zillow goes to some lengths to establish authenticity and award attribution to listings’ contributors. The robotic approach is probably the easy way out (initially) but I question both its quality and accuracy and I think those frustrations will ultimately impact the usefulness of listings bots to buyers.
Rich listings are another challenge for the robotic approach. On Zillow for example, homes that are posted for sale include unlimited images, “what the owner likes about this home” and “neighborhood info”. That data is not typically available via feeds. One of the core challenges of a centralized distribution approach is that data formats typically get normalized for ease of integration but the resulting content then only reflects the lowest common denominator.
We thought it was important to first build the best possible showcase for your listings. We are now definitely focused on making it easier to post listings to Zillow (and have made some early changes based on agent feedback) but it’s premature to speculate about what those innovations might look like. Please keep the feedback coming.
January 11, 2007 — 4:22 pm
Greg Swann says:
Hi, David,
I’ve been forever getting back to this. My apologies.
I will happily concede that a Zillow listing is much richer than those found on services that might reasonably be called listing bots.
And: I will make you a deal. The MLS feed that is available to any ARMLS subscriber contains 248 fields of data. The photos and captions are missing, among other things, so it’s not as rich as a full feed. But it is available to all Realtors, which means that any ARMLS member, potentially, has automated access to much of what makes a Zillow listing so rich.
If y’all were to make an XML format available, Cameron or I would build a little server-side bot to process as much as possible from the ARMLS feed and shoot it off to you by email, API or scheduled pick-up. You could assign a username and password to agents for your security purposes, so each instance of this software would be unique. Agents would have to go in post-hoc to add photos, captions and other unique elements. If a listing that came in by an earlier feed is absent from the current feed, you will know that that home is sold/cancelled/expired.
In addition, when we have perfected the bot — text processing is duck soup — we will make the source available to people working in other MLS systems, so that they might build similar bots and make them available to local agents.
This requires almost nothing on the Zillow side: A format and a way of receiving and vetting formatted files. Are you game?
January 18, 2007 — 5:57 pm