Starting tomorrow Zillow will be charging for all manual listing uploads to their site. This, as they also add rental properties to their site as well (here’s looking at you Apartments.com, you’re next in the crosshairs).
Adding a property for sale (or rent) on Zillow either as a homeowner or agent will now set you back $9.95 for a 3-month 6-month listing. Volume discounts are also available for individuals wanting to list 50 properties or more and can provide a data feed. Using a syndication tool like vFlyer or Postlets however, will still let you upload your listings for free.
Zillow has made steady gains in market-share since its launch. And in the early days it was all about building out its database. But clearly now, Zillow feels like it has hit its stride with the acquisition of new listings and either a) no longer needs the manual uploads or b) feels the heat and needs to start to monetizing that inventory.
In either case, it’s a way for them to shake the tree a bit and and see if they can loosen up any incremental revenue from within their network.
The shift to a pay-to-play model does run somewhat counter to the good corporate citizen image the company has publicly tried to espouse with agents. But I suspect Zillow knows this as well. Hence the soft rollout and the hedge with the syndicators.
Nevertheless, Zillow’s representatives claim only 3% of their 4 million listed homes are manually uploaded – the remainder come from bulk upload feeds from third-party syndicators, brokers and MLSs – so at 10 bucks a pop, that’s a tidy $1.2M in quarterly revenue a couple million bucks the company now hopes to pocket. Not huge dollars, but in this day and age… every dollar counts.
Photo by swanksalot
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Hey Joel
So now we are 180 degrees from where it all started. Time “was” when local markets received consideration for providing all the inventory to appear on various portals. Rationale attributed to ceasing this practice was that there just wasn’t the money available to pay for the inventory while still investing in gaining traffic.
Part of Zillow’s bet here is that folks who do not currently “opt in” via the local syndication engine will begin doing so wherever available. Our experience indicates that “opt in” results in substantially less inventory on those sites vs “opt out”.
Interesting strategy for content acquisition given the RPR announcement. RPR of course is requiring that markets provide all of the local inventory in return for limited use of public records. RPR in turn has unlimited (or at least undetermined) rights to derivative products and associated revenues.
Hmmm….as currently described both these scenarios seem odd. The “secret sauce” (all of it) found in the local market information appears to be the missing ingredient that everyone needs yet no one wants to pay for.
Congrats on the new gig Joel!
David
They are also charging Mortgage folks to contact loan inquiries. I’m not sure the mortgage thing will work, however I suppose the listings exposure could be more valuable to a realtor. What happened to the internet being free!!?
http://www.oregonmortgageblog.com
[...] From Zillow (Eric Stegemann) – Announcing: Rental Listings and Search (Zillow) – Zillow starts charging for listings (Joel Burslem) – Zillow Play Zanta – Craigslist finds a lump of coal (Kris [...]
Hey Joel,
I need to clarify that Zillow is not now charging for a feature that was once free as your post suggests. Rather, we have moved all manually posted listings to featured listings (which have always been a paid product on Zillow.) Featured listings receive 6X the traffic that normal listings do on Zillow. There’s significant value for a very nominal charge here. Could you please clarify this in your post?
I must be one of the few that has been entering listings manually. I started manual input because there were so many errors coming from feeds we were using. Now I guess it’s back to using postlets or vflyer.
Congrats on your new job Joel!
Rita
[...] Zillow starts charging for listings | 1000Watt Consulting – Starting tomorrow Zillow will be charging for all manual listing uploads to their site. This, as they also add rental properties to their site as well… [...]
@ David Charron
I think that’s a really interesting point that you bring up, that the goal could be in fact to push most people towards the syndicators.
The upshot is Z gets cleaner data and doesn’t have to moderate a 120,000 manual listings anymore.
Joel
Most markets now provide syndication capabilities for its customer brokers. Some of us provide this as a member service while others facilitate provider’s ability to go direct to the broker. For lots of reasons, most notably having the broker assume a more active role in the decision process. As importantly and as a by-product of the NAR/DOJ agreement, most syndication capable markets embrace “opt-in”.
This latter point serves as a bit of a sticking point with the portals because they generally garner 2/3 to 3/4 of the inventory. Not a bad take but well short of Nirvana. Charging folks for manual upload of inventory may result in agents petitoning brokers to leverage what may already be in place locally. Or it may backfire as agents get “nickeled and dimed’ and as brokers feel they are once again forced to do something different that may/may not benefit them.
I believe this pentration will likely improve over time. But as each portal adjusts their model and associated fees, the brokers can provide some pretty immediate feedback via the snyndication dashboard.
[...] Joel Burselm’s post on 1000watt blog, zillow.com community director David Gibbons clarified how the pricing model has [...]
The point that gets my attention the most is not that they are charging for this service, it’s that they actually found a niche market of people who still manually enter their listings. they’re basically punishing/making money off people for not keeping up with the technology.
I’d be interested in seeing how Zillow steers their move into the highly competitive online rental market. Apartments.com does well with their affiliate program, paying up to $10 per lead. According to the most recent stats I’ve seen they’ve had a 50% increase, year over year, for the month of November in leads generated by their affiliates. That stat is useless without comparing to what Apartments.com generates on their own but it seems like a leg up and with the level of competition in online rentals it is a leg up worth having.
Zillow has always said that their business model it to make money off of advertising. If they do indeed drive more traffic, 6 times by their account, then it will probably be worth $9.95 for the 6 month listing. I’m a manual lister myself, part of the 3% minority, mostly because I have more control over my listings that way.
Zillow is becoming more and more irrelevant in our business. For starters, Craigslist has brought Zillow to its knees.
[...] comments were relatively quiet on zillow.com’s own blog, but over at 1000watt blog and agentgenius.com things were different, prompting zillow.com’s spokespeople to [...]
Craigs List gets us 10X more business. Zillow gets me marginal results. Ya, we will start paying for manual uploads….right. Syndication takes weeks to show-up on Zillow sometimes. Manual uploads were the only way to get them on the sight or that is what you wanted. We will not be using Zillow manual uploads. It is just another way to pick our agents pockets. Plus the evaluations of homes is so far off it’s not funny. mmmmm my house is worth 500k….well mabe in 2006. However, according to zillow it still is?????
Slowly Z seems to be making it’s way towards the R.com business model.
Mike Lewis said:
“Zillow is becoming more and more irrelevant in our business. For starters, Craigslist has brought Zillow to its knees.”
“…to its knees.” HA! I almost thought you were serious with that one! Oh boy that was a good one.
Classic. We’ll cry and whine for a bit then 99% of those who talk all big and brave about leaving Zillow will be right back because they know it’s worth it. At the very least, they’ll give it a shot and watch their ROI closely to verify if it’s the case for them.
I wouldn’t hire an agent that refused to pay barely 5 cents a day to market my home on a site that gets millions of eyeballs every month. And remember – the number of agents that would have to even pay this measly figure is sooooo low anyway.
Let’s get the crying done and move on already!
KW
There also seems to be less traffic to send to apartments listings than Zillow originally claimed earlier this week.
According to Comscore zillow is NOT the number real estate site; Realtor.com is.
BTW zillow also trails much maligned AOL in real estate according to Comscore.
http://tiny.cc/4grUn
It’s a testimony to this site and Zillow that David G has responded to this article. Like many before them, they have got their platform right before maximising the opportunity that they have built. I say good luck to them
My company already sends all it’s listings to Zillow but I have been manually inputting the listings with photos. I ask all buyers where they saw my listing. I’ve never had anyone say they saw it on zillow. I spend so much money already, I’m not going to begin paying every website that wants my listings to post them. If it weren’t for our listings they’d have no website. A ripoff, IMO.
J. Bidwell,
You’re only charged if it’s a manual posting. Send them through a feed and they’ll all be free still.
I’ve always thought the “if it weren’t for our listings they’d have no website” argument was so weak. Bottom-line is that this is a symbiotic relationship: all sides who choose to participate get something out of it. Agents are listing homes there because Zillow is getting 6+ million visitors per month or something like that, which means more eyeballs look at your listings. So its ludicrous to make it sound like Zillow takes and doesn’t give anything in return. If the ROI really wasn’t there for you or your company then you’d leave. But you don’t because it’s not the case. That, or those in charge at your company are dumb and I’d like to think that’s not the case.
They certainly aren’t perfect, but they’re also not pointing a gun at your head to use their service. You can leave at any time.
KW