Friday, October 19, 2007

The Zillow Quandry

OK so Zillow is getting a bunch of traffic, that's a fact but the question for Realtors is what kind of traffic is Zillow getting and how can it help me? Is Zillow getting hits from potential home buyers, potential home sellers or simply from people who are curious about the value of their home? Oh by the way, there is another big user of Zillow, mortgage professionals who use Zillow to determine if there is enough value in a borrowers home to justify a refinance. I'm thinking a lot of mortgage guys are using Zillow everyday which really doesn't help Realtors or home sellers.

My take on the deal is that most of Zillow's traffic is from people who are curious about the value of a home versus someone actually looking for homes to buy. Think about it, any home buyer that has heard the term MLS and has searched for their local mls in Google has figured out that the mother lode of homes for sale is not on Zillow, Trulia or sites like them who are busy trying to build a national database of home inventory, but on the sites of local realtors. So to think of Zillow as a great place to find buyers is a bit of a stretch. I haven't spent any time looking at Zillows Q&A section yet and in fact there might be some opportunities for agents to engage prospects in meaningful conversations that ultimately end in real estate transactions, but this is the same activity that Realtors are being told they should be doing with their blogs.

So what's an agent to do and how much time should an agent spend on Zillow and, what is Zillows ultimate motive in all this? Time will tell but knowing what I know about real estate and the Internet today, As an agent I would be spending my time build my web presence/brand in my local market using tools like a blog and an IDX broker reciprocity feed which gives my visitors access to almost all the homes for sales in their area. At the end of the day, the agent is still the one who makes it all happen!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi Ken, it's David from Zillow,

I do hear that buyers are hard to find in today's market but assure you that there are plenty of buyers using Zillow. Here are some stats for our August survey of Zillow users;

About 4 Million people use Zillow each month.
- 90% are homeowners (3.6M)
- 84% are consumers & investors (78% + 6% = 3.36M)
- More than 70% plan to buy or sell in 1 or 2 years (>2.8M)
- More than 40% are currently buying or selling (>1.6M)

Zillow's a great place to find buyers and one could argue that buyers use Zillow earlier in their research than they do other real estate sites; so, there's a good chance of finding an unrepresented buyer.

To get a feel for what the buyers on Zillow are thinking, check out the Discussions about "Buying a Home":
http://www.zillow.com/forum/site/ViewCategory.htm?tcid=6