If you didn't find what you were looking for, try a new search!
On July 4th in Atlanta, GA, a Fox 5 affiliate covered a story about the Hall County Sheriff’s Department warning potential home buyers and renters about scammers using actual listings and putting them under fake names on Zillow.
Zillow took a page out of Property Panorama’s playbook by using visualizations to create a 360-degree tour and stitching them together, which they call Zillow 3D Home – and claim it is a 3D tour.
I have been reading articles about Zillow Group’s positioning on Upstream and the forms licensing policy of the California Association of REALTORS® with great interest. My take away is that Zillow Group is doing and saying exactly what they should be doing and saying to positively impact Zillow’s market opportunities in real estate. Remember, Zillow has industry relations people and government relations people that want to fight tooth and nail for every advantage they can get. It’s business.
Real Estate is a fickle industry, cycling back and forth from favoring buyers to favoring sellers. It does not take an economist to develop a strategy for when to advertise for buyers and when not to. Certainly, real estate is in a condition of buyer saturation today. Brokers and agents who are advertising for buyers are mismanaging their advertising spend.
Since its early days, Zillow Group has maintained a position that the consumer interest is best served by allowing listings from all sources, including For Sale By Owner, to be posted to their site. This may be, in part, why Zillow sites had up to 187 Million unique users visit their sites last year. Recently, WAV Group has noticed a new type of broker support that is in line with this policy.
Homes.com signs direct agreement to receive REBNY’s Residential Listing Service feed Norfolk, Va. (August 9, 2017) – Homes.com®, the leading online real estate destination and provider of real estate marketing solutions, has announced that the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) will join Homes.com’s Data Partnership Program through a direct syndicated feed agreement with REBNY’s Residential Listing Service (RLS). The new partnership will offer the more than 600 New York City residential brokerage firms, comprised of 12,860 agents participating in REBNY’s RLS, the option to display their listings on Homes.com and utilize free exposure to their audience of more than 14 [...]
WAV Group supports brokers and MLSs in constructing data licensing agreements with users of data records that belong to the broker. When a company like Zillow ingests broker data, likeZILLOW340x230 all recipients, they must adhere to the data license agreement which typically requires that you cannot allow the data to be used by a third party. The blog McMansionHell.com is learning the hard way that using data from Zillow without proper authority is a copyright violation that Zillow will pursue. Not only will Zillow pursue the violation, but they may be contractually bound to pursue the violation. The media around the case is [...]
“Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, NRT, Redfin – all brokers. Do brokers drop out of IDX because they are selling homes in their market? Brokers share their listings with these large firms everyday. If Zillow joins the list, what’s the diff?” This is the conversation starter that an investment banker had with me today. I appreciate having conversations with people in the capital markets. Bankers see the world differently. They believe that markets shape themselves and that great companies lead markets. Perhaps Zillow Group has its heart in its current service offerings today. The company protests against becoming a brokerage, but [...]
One of the greatest philosophers of all time was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). For brevity, let’s call him Hegel and be thankful to the University of Berlin where he lectured. I will suspend with the deep philosophy I learned in college and summarize Hegel as the author of a triad of historical development referred to thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In our observation, the MLS is the thesis, Zillow® is the antithesis, and what happens next will be the synthesis. Moreover, I will argue that Zillow may have opened the door to their demise with the Instant Offers™ test. Thesis [...]
According to a news release today, Black Knight Financial Services, developers of the Paragon MLS system and has partnered with Zillow for data management tools. Zillow purchased Bridge Interactive last year, a company that is well known for RETS servers (Contact) and listing input modules (Compose) for MLSs. As part of the alignment between the two companies, the release states that Zillow will be providing the technology to aggregate data from all of the hundreds of markets into Zillow’s data repository which Black Knight calls Property Information Central (PIC). This new system will act as the solution that will provide [...]
Zillow Group, which includes the websites of Zillow and Trulia have landed on a broker strategy for marketing that works. Zillow Group, which includes the websites of Zillow and Trulia have landed on a broker strategy for marketing that works. Featured listings are dead, and have been replaced with a product to advertise in ways that drive the largest margin opportunity for a brokerage firm – leads to eTeams and Relocation. I call this “shared display,” where the brokerage and agent are clearly displayed and may be contacted – easily understood as “your listing, same leads.” This functionality works equally well [...]
Zillow Group announced the purchase of Bridge Interactive, making them the provider of listing input in a number of MLSs, and the data distribution manager in many others. In some ways, Bridge Interactive is like Upstream, but not a competitor. Bridge is about helping brokers solve data problems and may become a conduit that more easily permits Upstream to allow brokers to deliver listing content to MLSs. Throughout the process of developing the Request for Proposal for Project Upstream, the technology workgroup evaluated many technology offerings. At the end of the day, there were three pieces to the Upstream puzzle that [...]
