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Plaintiff VHT Inc., a real estate photography studio, sued online real estate service Zillow for copyright infringement, alleging that Zillow’s use of VHT’s photographs on its website exceeded the scope of the licenses VHT had with brokers, agents and listing services.
This week, Zillow announced that Stan Humphries is retiring. He is an economist and the person that some have called the father of the Zestimate. The primary reason we looked at Zillow’s financial history today was in reference to this change in leadership.
Even after making the conversion from a third party portal to a brokerage website, Zillow continues to innovate on features that the consumer enjoys. In a recent press release, Zillow announced that consumers will be able to remove listings from their search results that they are not interested in.
In a press release today, Zillow has launched Renter Hub. They claim that renters can save thousands using Zillow’s new search tool to better time their move. This is great for property owners and renters too, as it reduces the vacancy days between renters.
The theme for the call was fairly simple, Zillow’s Super App. Zillow proceeded to talk about all of the investments, development, and ‘awesomeness’ that their Super App is going to be. It sounds like it will not be much more than a few enhancements that give home shoppers some nice features – 3-D tours (like Matterport), financing options (grow Zillow Mortgage), and adding services like ShowingTime.
In their Q4 earnings reports, Zillow laid out an impressive and visionary strategy that makes total sense for consumers and creates an enormous challenge to real estate brokers who are not taking the full cycle of homeownership seriously. Zillow calls this strategy the “housing super app.” To me, it looks like an exact copy of the strategy being deployed by Milestones.ai.
When Zillow Group® announced the acquisition of ShowingTime®, the industry began kicking up dust the same way they did after the DotLoop® deal.
If there is an emerging trend in broker websites today, it is collaborative search. TRIBUS had the functionality a decade ago, but really improved the product with a release announced this week called Households Collaborative Search; it is the beginning of home ownership portals. One spot for everything that includes all members of the household.
Wow! Yet MORE Big News coming out of Zillow today! They just announced they are buying Showingtime. So many MLSs and brokerages use Showingtime - there will be big implications with this one.
In the early days of listing syndication, WAV Group investigated the terms of use on third party advertising websites like Zillow.com®, Trulia.com® and others. Zillow® and Trulia®, who received data through listing syndication feeds rather than though data licensing terms with MLSs like Realtor.com® and Homes.com® had some shocking language.
In an announcement today – Zillow launched Zillow Homes, a licensed brokerage entity in Georgia and Arizona.
Trestle has a number of security features that MLSs prefer and MLS board of directors probably trust CoreLogic more than Zillow.
