Category: Zillow.com (page 5 of 13)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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 Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m thinking the lending product, whatever it turns out to be, is going to involve some kind of Customer Relationship Management/Transaction Management component anyway. And what does everyone say made it worthwhile to drink the HouseValues.com KoolAde? Yep — CRM/TM.

Here’s my big-picture take: If you’re in any sort of business where the added-cost per additional increment approaches zero — all of TP’s costs are accounted for by customer #1, transaction #1; after that, they’re storing and swapping electrons — watch out. Anyone who is willing to eat your front-loaded costs can eat your lunch.

What’s the counter-measure? Price your product at zero. The plausible alternative to free is not-only-free-but-WAY-better. Otherwise, your installed-base should stay put, with all the new converts up for grabs. That’s a first-mover advantage, provided the first-mover stays nimble. Welcome to the Web 2.0 world…

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology, Zillow.com

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Glenn Kelman wonders a little too self-revealing about the hype motivating serial entrepreneurs. Guy Kawasaki jumps to exactly the wrong conclusion, asserting that VC funds are wasted if a start-up’s founders have conquered their acne. And Marlow Harris wonders if the whole thing is simply Kelman campaigning for his next job.

Loren Nason asks an excellent question: Why the hell isn’t Apple pushing product at the NAR Convention? At a minimum, the smart folks from the Apple Store at the Fashion Show Mall could be selling iPhones by the dozens.

The New York Times notes that TV is losing viewership to on-line alternatives. Ya think? Everything that exists exists in finite quantity. The more of my leisure time I spent on the nets, the less I will have to spend on other pursuits. The more my work time and leisure time blend together, the more everything looks like a nail. If you’re not selling nails, precisely what do you think you have to sell me?

Finally, in more jobs news, Vanessa we hardly knew ye. I didn’t think this was big news on the way in, so I’m less that whelmed on the way out. Much more interesting, a little bug in my ear intimates, is this:

But Fox isn’t the only one who has departed the heavily-funded company in recent months. She said there have been a few people who have left to pursue early-stage opportunities, while one Zillow employee recently set sail for Facebook. Still, she said there is by no means a “revolving door” at the company.

However, some former Zillow engineers — Logan Bowers, Sameer Rayachoti and Greg Whelan — left to create a Seattle startup called Fridge Door. I have been tracking the stealthy startup for the past few days, but have yet to uncover a Web site or contact details. (Shoot me an e-mail if you know it or if you work at the company and are reading this.) I am told that others have left, though not sure if the churn rate is unusually high for a company of that size.

I know nothing about the world of start-up companies, Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There has been a ton of Zillow.com “news” lately, but mainly I’ve been ignoring it. News is news when it is something other than PR — free advertising for the company pushing the press release. In other words, what’s-in-it-for-me? — or for you or for anyone other than the owners of the company.

So:

• Zillow announces new listings from Big Bob’s Bait and Realty
• Zillow discovers newspapers don’t know what was planned for Hansel and Gretel
• After months of announcements, Zillow finally takes listings feeds
• Zillow announces even more new listings from multiple miscellaneous sources
• Zillow rapidly approaches a one-percent listings penetration; if you’re looking for a home, almost one out of hundred are now on-line!

Okayfine. I don’t care. The feed is a happening thing, but I said a long time ago they would have to have one, at which time they demurred. If they celebrate with a cupcake for each new brokerage they sign up, they may someday have to go to Costco once a week to buy more cupcakes. Good news for them. Not very interesting otherwise.

But then there’s this:

In addition, today Zillow is announcing its revolutionary Zillow Virtual Sold Sign program (VSS), to be added to Zillow Listings Feeds in the coming months. The VSS program allows a broker’s branding and contact information to permanently become part of a sold home’s Web page on Zillow, where four million people visit every month, 70 percent of whom are buying or selling in the next two years. The VSS functionality is free to all brokerages and Web vendors with Zillow Listings Feeds.

“Imagine having a permanent ‘sold by’ sign in front of every home a brokerage has ever sold — giving buyers and sellers a critical piece of information on who is selling homes in a neighborhood — today and over time,” said Rich Barton, Zillow co-founder and CEO. “Given Zillow’s focus on all homes — more than 70 million of them — and not just those on the market today, we are in a unique position to provide this historical sales information to buyers, sellers and homeowners.”

Now that’s interesting. If you list well in Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Q: Is there room in the Realty.bot business for a third major player?

A: What business?

Joel Burslem came to Phoenix last week, and I had a chance to spend a few hours with him before he flew back to Portland. Because I live and breathe real estate and because I’m casually cruel in a thoughtless kind of way, I punished him with real estate tour — major commercial developments with side trips into residential neighborhoods. Joel’s observation: “There sure are a lot of ranch houses.”

It’s one of my life’s goals to be a kinder, more thoughtful person, but dramatic differences may require a reincarnation or two. Even so, I didn’t just make Joel look at houses. We had plenty of opportunities to talk as we meandered. One of the topics I wanted to discuss was the profit potential for Realty.bots like Zillow.com and Trulia.com. Zillow has firmly embraced the Google.com business model of delivering advertising based on targeted search. Trulia had just moved to a business model pioneered by Realtor.com — milk the listers.

My question is this: Taking account that I myself am impervious to advertising, how is any of this going to play out in the long run? People will pay for clicks for a while, but sooner or later they’re going to try to account for those clicks in converted sales. If the impact of advertising is not demonstrably cost-efficient, then why do it? I’m not saying this will happen, but as media consumers become more and more like me, it seems to me to be more and more likely.

Into that steaming cow-pie steps CyberHomes, about to emerge from a year-long beta period:

That’s not auspicious, but who know what tomorrow will bring.

But, more importantly: Who cares?

For now, CyberHomes is Yet Another Map-Based Automated Valuation Model. Punch in your address and you get a wild-eyed pricing guess based on tax records and statistics and having no material connection to the actual house, which, as I have demonstrated in the past, may not actually even be there. So far: Big yawn.

CyberHomes hopes to dominate the hugely unprofitable free-AVM market by having access Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been saying this for a long time: Buyers are temporarily interested in listings. Owners are always interested in their homes. Zillow.com wants buyers, hence the move to accept listings feeds. But what they really want are owners, people who will come back to the site again and again, potentially to be sold new stuff every time they come back.

Remember 13 months ago when Zillow opened up and let sellers create Do-It-Yourself Zestimates, detailing all the unZestimated changes they had made to the home?

Today all that data gets put to use. Zillow has a brand new advertising program called Home Direct Ads that will use every bit of the data it has collected to target market ads to particular buyers, to vendors like movers or remodeling contractors — even to visitors to specific homes in the Zillow database.

From the company’s press release:

Leading real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced the launch of Zillow® Home Direct Ads, a new set of patent-pending tools that enables advertisers to identify and connect online with homeowners who are on the verge of making major home-related purchases such as moving or updating the home they currently own.

The sophisticated toolset capitalizes on Zillow’s most compelling asset: data-rich, individual Web pages for more than 70 million U.S. homes that attract regular visits by the homeowners themselves. Zillow Home Direct Ads helps advertisers target ads to these homeowners by individual address, by value of their home, by psychographic cluster such as urban families with children, or even by whether they are planning to move. This type of intent and address-specific targeting has never before been available for advertisers online.

“What we’re offering advertisers is pin point accuracy on the purchasing intentions of homeowners, including the ability to forecast that they are highly likely to move or remodel well before they start the process,” said Greg Schwartz, Zillow vice president of ad sales. “Our advertisers can target ads down to the specific address or home value, or learn other facts about the neighborhood and locality that will allow them to tailor ads directly to this audience. As a result, advertisers are Read more