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25 06, 2015

Trulia in the Zillow Era

By |2018-05-03T21:23:40-07:00June 25th, 2015|Main category|Comments Off on Trulia in the Zillow Era

As an analyst for many brokerages, franchises, and MLSs, WAV Group looks carefully at reports from publishers to understand dynamics that can be leveraged to enhance performance. Sometimes, we encourage firms to keep their strategy the same. At other times we encourage trying something new or redeploying investment. I like Trulia’s reporting. It is something that other publishers (including their parent company) could benefit from. Below I will provide a discussion about each. Leads – in their purest form, leads count. Even bad leads. If you are a broker and you are not producing leads for your agents, you may [...]

22 04, 2015

Zillow/Trulia Executive to Headline San Diego REALTOR® Expo

By |2018-05-03T21:23:46-07:00April 22nd, 2015|Main category, Marketing, Press Releases|Comments Off on Zillow/Trulia Executive to Headline San Diego REALTOR® Expo

Largest REALTOR® Event in San Diego County Explores Industry Changes SAN DIEGO, CA--(Marketwired - April 22, 2015) - With the recent Zillow-Trulia merger and changes to real estate listing syndication in San Diego, what is the future of online real estate search portals? That's the big question to be answered by a panel of real estate marketing heavyweights -- including Zillow/Trulia Vice President Curt Beardsley, WAV Group Consulting Partner Victor Lund, and Move/Realtor.com Vice President Russ Cofano -- at the annual San Diego County REALTOR® Expo & Conference on Friday, April 24. WHAT | The annual San Diego County REALTOR [...]

7 03, 2015

Direct Feeds to Zillow Group

By |2018-05-03T21:23:49-07:00March 7th, 2015|Main category, MLS Insights, Strategic Planning|3 Comments

MLS RETS servers are designed to deliver IDX, VOW, and Full Data feeds to brokers and their vendors. With few exceptions, they were not purpose built for sending listing syndication feeds to publishers. Syndication feeds are the domain of Listhub. With Listhub’s support of Zillow Group’s websites going away, you must act now to determine what your plans are. MLS RETS Servers are emerging with new features that blend in Syndication support for Direct Feeds to Publishers like the Zillow Group. The defining difference between Listhub and direct feeds may be complex or simple. The complex path is considered by [...]

23 12, 2014

Spending Over $60K Per Month on Zillow

By |2018-05-03T21:23:51-07:00December 23rd, 2014|Broker Technology Research, Main category|1 Comment

It is not very hard to find out who Zillow's top customers are. Just visit the website and look at the Agent Reviews section. One of those top customers is Samer Kuraishi Group from the Washington, D.C. area. Samer is a second generation real estate agent. The brokerage, A-K Real Estate, Inc. ("A-K") is a boutique 40 agent firm, located about two blocks from the White House, that was founded by his father. Together, they have grown the company significantly, supporting consumers in Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Much of the company's growth has happened over the past few years and was [...]

13 08, 2014

The End Of War Between Zillow and Trulia

By |2018-05-03T21:24:01-07:00August 13th, 2014|Broker-Agent Information, Main category, MLS Insights|Comments Off on The End Of War Between Zillow and Trulia

There is a major war going on in the taxi industry today. Uber and Lyft are duking it out. Both companies have deep cash pockets and they are deploying it in marketing and undercutting each other. It is pretty hard to know which service is better as they work hard to drive market share. As Zillow marches toward the stock swap to join forces with Trulia, perhaps a new wisdom of that transaction will reveal itself. They just avoided a very expensive war where the two of them may have killed each other off to reign supreme. It is pretty [...]

28 07, 2014

Zillow Announces Trulia Acquisition

By |2018-05-03T21:24:02-07:00July 28th, 2014|Main category, MLS Insights, Press Releases|Comments Off on Zillow Announces Trulia Acquisition

Two of America's third party real estate portals have entered into a definitive agreement for Zillow (Z) to purchase Trulia (TRLA) for $3.5 billion in stock-for-stock trade. The Board of Directors of both companies have agreed to the transaction which represents a 25 percent premium to Trulia Stockholders, based on Trulia's closing price on Friday, July 25, 2014. The transaction will now face regulatory approval. Goldman, Sachs & Co. brokered the transaction. Trulia CEO Pete Flint will retain that title, join the Zillow Board of Directors along with one other designee, and will remain the leader of the Trulia.com business unit. He will report [...]

13 06, 2014

Coming Soon Listings On Zillow

By |2018-05-03T21:24:05-07:00June 13th, 2014|Main category|3 Comments

The cat is out of the bag. Zillow has gone where no MLS has gone before. They have embraced the broker and agent demand for pre-marketing listings. They are entering a place where Zillow will have listing content before listings become available. Consumers are going to love it, brokers and agents are going to love it, and MLSs are going to hate it. The program is called Coming Soon, and allows brokers and agents to market listings on Zillow up to 30 days before publishing it in the MLS. Clean lines and business rules are the cornerstones of the MLS [...]

13 02, 2013

Are my listings going everywhere – Zillow Front Door

By |2018-05-03T21:24:41-07:00February 13th, 2013|Broker Technology Research, Main category, Marketing|2 Comments

Whenever an announcement like the Zillow-Front Door announcement is made, brokers have questions about their data and where it is going. We call this the issue of re-syndication, and whenever an announcement is made made about one party sending data to another party - brokers should know. Zillow is not re-syndicating to HGTV's Frontdoor.com website. The first thing that I would suggest to any broker providing data to any publisher is to have a contract with the publisher that defines what they can or cannot do with your data. Most of the franchisors like REALOGY, Keller Williams, RE/MAX, and others have such [...]

8 02, 2013

Zillow to power HGTV

By |2018-05-03T21:24:42-07:00February 8th, 2013|Broker Technology Research, Main category, Press Releases|Comments Off on Zillow to power HGTV

I have always been a fan of HGTV’s strategy to marry their television audience and content with property search. I do not watch TV much, but I do tune into HGTV from time to time and have run some analysis on the comprehensiveness of the listing data on their site. From our point of view, HGTV did not go far enough to put timely calls to action into programming to drive the television audience to search for homes on their property search portal. This is my opinion, not grounded in any facts. Suffice it to say that Zillow is going [...]

26 11, 2012

Zillow expands rental offering with Hotpads acquisition

By |2018-05-03T21:24:47-07:00November 26th, 2012|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Main category, MLS Insights|Comments Off on Zillow expands rental offering with Hotpads acquisition

Market leading real estate publisher Zillow expanded their footprint by entering into an agreement to purchase Hot Pads today. The strategy behind the acquisition seems squarely aimed at conquering a larger audience of real estate consumers, namely consumers interested in rental properties. In October, Hotpads had nearly 2.8 Million Unique Visitors. Depending on how you add up traffic to Zillow and their other sites like realestate.yahoo.com, it adds up to less than a 5% increase in traffic. Moreover, Zillow picks up highly skilled staff that understand the real estate portal business, and how to manage data. Although Zillow already has [...]

29 10, 2012

Zillow brings 1.2M listings out of the shadow

By |2018-05-03T21:24:49-07:00October 29th, 2012|Broker Technology Research, Main category|3 Comments

Since the housing market crash, there has been lots of discussion about shadow inventory. These are properties that are in bank foreclosure or pre-foreclosure that are making their way onto the market. Up until now, this inventory has been slowly released - perhaps strategically by banks who want to contain loss exposure - but more likely as a result of the slow process for foreclosure across America. The only thing slower than a bank's decision making process is the US Court system. Last week, Zillow - one of the three leading search portals in America began to display 1.2Million listings. [...]

3 07, 2012

Zillow brings battle to Listhub

By |2018-05-03T21:24:56-07:00July 3rd, 2012|Broker Technology Research, Main category, MLS Insights|6 Comments

Zillow launched a preemptive strike against Listhub yesterday by requesting IDX feeds from the nation's MLS providers. Zillow Executive Bob Bemis sent an email to all MLS CEOs and Executives titled "Why two data feeds when one will do." In the email, Bemis admits that Zillow.com is focused on improving data accuracy and timeliness. The note goes on to explain that Zillow's IDX service, Diverse Solutions, already has the data, why not allow Zillow to use it for Zillow.com so Zillow can circumvent their reliance on Listhub data feeds. A battle ensued when Listhub got word that Zillow was calling them out on [...]