The Perfect Real Estate 2.0 Company

[photopress:timeYOU_big.jpg,thumb,alignright]If I had millions of dollars like Jim and Shirley Wilson now have (254M Powerball this week) I would create what I feel is a void in market today. I would take a Zillow like property evaluation tool and add a social networking back end to it. This was actually some of the conversations Dustin, Robbie and I had over a year ago when I was first introduced to RCG.

Anyway, what the market needs now is a valuation tool like Zillow that is enhanced by taking in to account neighborhoods, the particular street the house is on, the property’s zoning, the neighbors to your left and right and many many more. Zillow has added features to allow home owners to update their statistics for a closer estimate, but there is nothing out there that allows the brainchild behind Web 2.0’s success… YOU! (also a reason I feel the Web 2.0 bubble is far from bursting).

This would allow owners, neighbors and most importantly realtors to add comments to their communities, neighboring houses and their own house. I can only imagine how valuable this content would be to future home owners. Matter of a face, this would add some type of accountability to neighbors and home owners to be ‘good neighbors’. I guess this would be like a Better Business Bureau for home owners. I am sure all of the tenured agents out there have heard horror stories of their clients having troubles with a new home where the Form 17 disclosures could not provide any protection. This would be especially valuable in multi family communities.

[photopress:my_currency.jpg,thumb,alignleft]San Francisco’s my-currency launched today looking to tap in to this resource. John Cook’s blog talks about it as My Currency takes on Zillow which I understand, but I feel the underlying message here is putting the power in the people’s hand. It is easy for a site to put together stats that combines total square footage by numbers of beds/bath times a special area by area multiplier (I assume this is similar to the formula most of these sites use), but the does that mean someone will actually pay that price? If this were true, I would sell my house today for 200k more than I think it is worth because Zillow says so 🙂

Where's Dogbert when you need him?

Before Reba posted her article on the upcoming House Values layoffs, I recently ran across an interesting article about HouseValues on MSN Investor. It was basically a press release from Zacks Investment Research that stated HouseValues (SOLD) made their list of the top 5 stocks to sell now. Needless to say, this is not a glowing recommendation.

Also during that same surfing session, I stumbled upon an article about AutoByTel (ABTL). At first glance, it may not be that germane to the issues that face HouseValues, but AutoByTel is essentially a variation of the HouseValues business model. AutoByTel’s business model is essentially, generate lots of internet traffic and sell leads to auto brokers/dealers. HouseValue’s business model is essentially, generate lots of internet traffic and sell leads to real estate agents/brokers.

A problem with this model (as the article noted), is that traffic acquisition costs are going up. The deals that a company like this are going to strike with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or some other major internet portal that brings in a lot of traffic are increasingly low margin / high cost deals. After all Google, and it’s fellow portal competitors know what the value of their net traffic is (and it isn’t going to get any cheaper).

Furthermore, there’s the $50+ million gorilla on the horizon…. Zillow. They have a more customer centric business model,  superior technology, lower head count expenses (last I heard they were about 100 employees), and would probably fare better in a beauty contest as well. Even if HouseValues were to reverse course by attempting emulate Zillow’s business practices, I get the feeling that they’d be less successful than Microsoft’s search efforts have been against Google.

Another problem, is that nationally the housing & mortgage market is cooling down. I guess this means there are fewer agents out there who are able to buy leads from the company (either that or there are fewer agents out who willing to buy leads, which portends an even bigger problem). It’d be interesting to see if this problem corrects itself when the housing market heats back up again or if the company has hit a strategic inflection point.

[photopress:sales_dropping.jpg,full,alignleft]What’s also interesting is ABTL has 377 employees (and $116.6 million in annual revenues), while SOLD has 522 employees (and about $101.9 million in annual revenues). Even though HouseValues just laid off 60 employees, it still feels there’s more head count there than what they need. Especially since their Selling/General/Administrative expenses are over 8 times what their Research & Development expenses are! For comparison sake, AutoByTel’s ratio is closer to 2.5 times, Microsoft’s ratio is a little under 2, Google’s ratio is a little over 2. It appears that the PHB (Pointy Haired Boss) hired too many sales drones and not enough Dilberts.

Frankly, if I ran the company, I’d probably try to get InterActiveCorp (IACI) to buy me. Why? InterActiveCorp is a diversified internet commerce company with 28,000 employees and had revenues of $6.6 billion last year. They own many popular web sites (Ticketmaster, Ask, Match.com, Home Shopping Network, Evite.com, Lending Tree, RealEstate.com), and they used to own Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire, and other travel related properties prior to their spinning off.

Because HouseValues would complement IACI’s LendingTree / RealEstate.com business units nicely and since a IACI spin off (Expedia) is already located in Bellevue, I’m sure there’s a way that IACI could extract more value out of the combined company that than HouseValue’s current management could do alone. Perhaps there’s a way in which the HouseValues employees who stuck around would only have to change their Kirkland commute to Bellevue commutes?

So is this the beginning of the HouseValues death spiral, or is just a temporary hiccup on the road to better days?

Interview with Drew Meyers of the Zillow Blog

[photopress:drewmeyers.jpg,full,alignright]Drew is one of the most frequent contributors on the Zillow Blog, which is considered to be one of the best corporate blogs around. I was fortunate to spend some time with Drew at the Blog Business Summit this past fall where I was also turned on to his personal blog where he takes on all types of technology issues. Drew has all the attributes of a great blogger… interesting, smart, opinionated… so I was particularly happy when he agreed to tell us about his blogging experiences.

What inspired you to start blogging?

We decided to start blogging at Zillow for a couple of reasons, well before the site even launched. We felt that blogging was, and still is, a powerful way to communicate. It allows us to talk to people; to give them insights into our site and the industry overall, while also gaining feedback directly from our users. Additionally, we believe in being transparent with our users (and the industry) and we try to do this by blogging about what is important and top of mind for the company. It’s real. It’s refreshing.

Personally, patience isn’t one of my strong traits (though I’m improving). Everyone who has worked in a software/web development environment probably knows that it takes time and man power to make an idea a reality. By blogging, I feel like I’m making an immediate impact to help build and strengthen Zillow’s brand one post at a time. Blogging is also a very creative way to express myself through writing.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

There are a number of personalities amongst those of us who are regular contributors to the blog, all with preferences on topics we like to write about. This is great for our readers, as we like to believe that there is something of interest for everyone on any given week — it is one of the perks of having a group blog. As for me, there isn’t one specific topic that I like to cover. I have many interests and real estate is a very broad category, giving me freedom to write about a wide range of issues – if I HAD to choose one, I’d say the technology side of real estate.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

Audiences increasingly want companies to provide some insight into the personalities behind a brand, a concept that blogging allows us to do. We encourage as many employees as possible to contribute. As you can see on our blog, there is a range of levels, departments and variety of topics that our contributors tackle. It can be our tech guys trying to explain the Safari issues, it can be our general counsel talking about the significance of the Craigslist ruling, it can be an intern pitching the widget he just created or Lloyd announcing that “we’re opening it up.” This range of contributors adds a dimension of personalization.

We’ve also recently added MyBlogLog’s “Recent Readers” widget to make it even more personal. We think this helps our readers connect with each other. We like the picture feature so much we are thinking about adding this to the site for our contributors in the near future.

Do you have any favorite posts?

There have been a ton of great posts since we first launched the blog in February. A few favorites that I have posted include:

  • Why Do You Blog? — Along with many others in the real estate industry, I have grown to really enjoy blogging. With this post I tried to get inside the heads of some of real estate’s most intriguing bloggers regarding why they are compelled to blog.
  • The Shire in Bend, OR — I really do like finding interesting or odd stories related to real estate that interests a wide audience. And seriously, I’m not including this just because it focuses on my uncle’s development — I would have written about the Shire even if the developer wasn’t a relative.
  • Seattle During a Windstorm — Zillow employees are down-to-earth people and sharing some personal stories is essential to building relationships with our users (even if those relationships are only virtual).

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

If you asked our blog team this question, each person would likely have very different answers (which again, makes us pretty unique). For me personally, my favorites include:

  • 3 Oceans – Kevin is an incredibly smart guy (our Blog Team even got to meet him while he was in Seattle) and likes to write about the technology side of real estate.
  • A VC – David Gibbons (Zillow Director of Customer Support) and I are both pretty avid readers of Fred Wilson’s blog focused primarily on the Web 2.0 space.
  • Scobleizer – What I really love about Robert Scoble is that he is REAL. He says what he thinks and doesn’t hide from any issue. He’s definitely a 1st mover in social media by revolutionizing corporate blogging while at Microsoft with his Naked Conversations book. His new company, Podtech, is an early front-runner in the podcasting and videocasting explosion.
  • Trizoko biz journal – This is an business blog that definitely has its own style. If you’re looking for some business advice mixed with a good chuckle, this one’s for you.
  • Guy Kawasaki – Guy is simply a fantastic communicator who always seems to write interesting stories.

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

I would say the team overall is the greatest tool. We tap into each other to bounce ideas around or to brainstorm new angles & then make them a reality through collaboration. We all have different news sources that we read regularly which mixes things up a bit. I’m a pretty big fan of regularly reading posts on Active Rain to find interesting perspectives on different topics within the industry.

Technology-wise, I do Technorati searches and have an RSS reader, both which help monitor the blogosphere to track industry blogs.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

Very heavily. As many of you know, Zillow has not spent any money on traditional advertising. Yet, we’ve managed to attract between 3 and 4 million users a month strictly via PR and word of mouth efforts. That said, the Zillow Blog is our primary communication tool with the outside world and thus has been very important to us from a marketing standpoint.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

In 2007, Zillow is planning to upgrade the site in a number of ways. The Zillow Blog team certainly has no shortage of ideas, but we always like to hear feedback as to what features would make our blog more interesting and engaging. Any ideas?Some features we are thinking about include:

  • Effectively surfacing recent comments and most popular posts
  • Author bios and photos
  • Burning feeds for each category of our blog
  • Giving the Zillow Blog team a better way to surface links we find interesting, but don’t have time to write a whole blog post about. Basically, a link-blog within the Zillow Blog structure.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?

We’d love to have a blog widget for the Zillow Blog that allows a reader to pull a Zestimate (via our API) right from the sidebar of the blog — hint, hint to the developer community. Between this and the features above, I would be a happy camper.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

I see it being different in four key ways. 1.) Real estate blogs will add multimedia, both audio and video (video blogging will explode in the next 3 years), to become more interactive. Many realtors will probably have short overview videos detailing all the neighborhoods that they cover available on their blogs. 2.) I think that about half of the influential industry bloggers today will remain highly influential – the ones that don’t tire of the time required to blog. 3.) I predict neighborhood blogs will all but overtake local neighborhood newspapers in the vast majority of major cities as consumers continue to turn to online news sources. 4.) I certainly agree with Sellsius’ response to this question — that a blog will be attached to EVERY real estate web site.

Glenn Kelman and Allan Dalton

[photopress:thumb_glenn_1_2_1.jpg,thumb,alignright]I was ROTFLMAO reading Glenn’s rendition of what happened at the Inman Conference where Glenn shared the stage with Allan Dalton…and apparently Zillow was there “didling with a microphone” when Glenn was looking for moral support. LOL Read Glenn’s article, it is a HOOT!!

[photopress:dalton_allan_1.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Allan Dalton is a fabulous speaker. If you’ve never had the honor, I highly recommend it. But let’s face it. Allan is as talented as David Letterman, and watching Glenn and Alan must be like watching Richard Simmons as a guest on the David Letterman show…PAINFUL!

Glenn says , “Many people afterwards congratulated me, for nothing in particular, which was very kind.” They were congratulating you for having the chutzpah to get up there in the first place and for going the whole Ten Rounds! And so do WE! But you have to ask yourself, what do you have to gain to stand in front of the a roomful of Realtors going toe to toe with their fearless leader? And as for “desk fees”, you were in NY for crissakesthey’re still paying splits out there. You’re lucky they didn’t drag you in the back and leave you for dead LOL Well, I for one am very glad they didn’t, and that you made it back in one piece.

Now I really do think it is time for Allan Dalton to have to face Zillow and Redfin in front of a crowd of Microsoft and Google employees! Come on! Let’s start selling tickets to that one. Allan’s a sport…he’s probably game. We’ll donate the proceeds to free Realtor.com Virtual Tours.

As for the Title of the Smackdown…”High Touch vs. High Tech”, ain’t too many people more “High Touch” than Glenn Kelman. Now stop going “nose to nose and toes to toes” with the wrong people! Go give a guest lecture at Microsoft. I’ll go on stage with you. They can throw tomatos at me 🙂 Little cherry ones though.

Interview with Rudy and Joe of the Sellsius Blog

In terms of real estate bloggers, Joe and Rudy are at the top of their game… Follow their blog for a little while and it becomes obvious that these are two guys who are committed to understanding, tracking and promoting the real estate blogosphere. I can’t be the only one to wonder if I’ll ever get a sneak peak at the money-making side of their operation (which was first announced on RCG in August 2005), but that is besides the point because this interview is about blogging and there is no doubt these guys have played a pivotal role in shaping the connections between real estate bloggers as it exists today!

What inspired you to start blogging?
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We started blogging very early. As Silver Sponsors of the Inman Connect NYC in January 2006, we attended several conferences on blogging and caught the bug. We were readers of RCG, Matrix, Inman & Property Grunt. Property grunt & Inman gave us positive press and encouragement and you gave us life as vaporware 🙂 We never forgot it. This really inspired us. In the beginning it was easier, since we had no readership to answer to. We felt, heck, no one is reading us so let’s do what we want. So, in a sense we inspired each other. We decided early on we’d break some rules, go our own way and see what happens. We’re still learning.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?
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We enjoy marketing , branding, advertising, technology and personal stories. Our business is promoting our members, helping them attract more clients and improving their bottom line. We are always looking for anything new and innovative that can help them.

What have you done to personalize your blog?
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Hopefully, our personality comes across in how we write, comment and choose our images. We try to interject humor and put the Sellsius° spin on a topic. We look for the exception to the rule and go against the grain when we feel it’s right. We stand up for the consumer’s right to informed choice, we advocate for professionals and want to improve the industry we love.

Do you have any favorite posts?
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We love all our Zillow posts, especially Unzillowable, To Coin a Phrase and Mining The Elusive Unzillowable, where JF debates David G. We are also proud of the Bell Labs posts where we collaborated with Ryan Block of Engadget to save a piece of technology history. We felt like journalists covering a story. We liked Realtor’s Allan Dalton Calls Zillow Carnival Act because we got to create our best Selltoon°. We also like our promo pieces (Mary Kay Gallagher and Willie Williams). We did a Year’s Best Posts so you get an idea of what we liked. We like a lot of what we do because we’re having so much fun.

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?
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We try to keep up with everyone in the real estate blogos. We would not choose a favorite because at different times we follow different blogs. It depends on the topic discussed. Zillow posts always get JF’s attention. Copyblogger is a must read. We also like Lifehacker, Micro Persuasion, TechCrunch, PronetAdvertising. There are so many more. We still visit grow-a-brain and Joe likes some Russian sites. We find a lot of great writing & commenting on Active Rain.

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?
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Bloglines, tabbed browsing, the Wire Services, YouTube, Wikipedia (often better than Google), Firefox extensions like AIOS & Stumbleupon, Google’s Images, Alerts, & News. Fast Stone Capture for screenshots & resizing images is a MUST. Tiny URL, CoComment & Commentful are useful commenting tools.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?
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The blog helps build the Sellsius° brand and we will use it to promote our membership. We are big believers in branding. We want the Sellsius° brand to represent trust, honesty, caring, knowledge and PASSION.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?
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We can’t be too specific other than saying we are going to better promote others, including other bloggers. We will also partner with other bloggers for new ideas we have for the genre. We have already collaborated on a consumer facing blog called MyHouseKey.org.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?
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We invented the Blog Surfer to help retrieve archived posts in a new way and increase page views. The blog surfer is a random remote control, a blog post stumbleupon. We would like it to be tag or category specific so you could surf only marketing posts, for example. Our page views skyrocketed with the surfer.
A tool I’d like to see is an automatic Table of Contents Creator where each post title would be sent to a categorized Table of Contents, with a corresponding link to the post. Blogs are like books and a Table of Contents is necessary. But keeping a Table of Contents up to date is cumbersome. If you visit our Table of Contents, it needs updating.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?
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Blogs will be attached to every real estate website. Every blog will have advertising of some kind. That won’t even take 3 years, maybe only 1. More contributing writers. More hired writers. Payment gateways to transact business on the blog. Blogs will be more varied. Skype on every blog. Blogoholics galore.

Thank you both Joe and Rudy for indulging me in this great interview!

Want more? Here are some more interviews with other influential people within the real estate blogosphere:

Zillow's Free Advertising – A Consumer Perspective

[photopress:warning.jpg,thumb,alignright] Before everyone jumps into the pool, every agent and owner must “LOOK before they LEAP”.

The Zillow Zestimate WILL appear, of course, in the same space as your “Property For Sale” listing. The printed data is also picking up the erroneous square footage info and number of bedrooms and baths from the tax records. So far it would appear that the owner can edit this data, but not the agent for the owner. Still playing with that.

Clearly, no agent should be listing a home where the Zestimate is less than the Asking Price, without first consulting with the owner, as I did last night BEFORE 9 p.m., having seen the proto-type last week. I am not particularly alarmed by this variance, but clearly the Zestimate being higher, rather than lower, would be a PLUS! 🙂 Attempting to turn a blind eye to the Zestimate, by not posting your home for sale there is no answer. Not here in the Seattle area where 82% of the buying public is likely to have seen the Zestimate, whether you invite them to do so or not. Seattle PI: “The company’s internal numbers (Zillow’s) indicate that 3.2 million people visited the site in November and that 82 percent of all homes in King County (WA) have been viewed on Zillow in the last 10 months.”

It is quite possible that the whole valuation process will pull in the direction of Zestimates, particularly in areas like ours with so many tech savvy buyers. In fact, I am already seeing a move in that direction for many properties on market and ones sold recently.

Whether or not you choose to post your home for sale on Zillow.com, these are issues facing everyone involved in real estate transactions. Buyers are making offers with the Zestimate price. Sellers and Agent’s for sellers will need to learn how to calculate the variance with some level of credible accuracy.

One of the reason’s David G. and Jeff, of Zillow, my parter Kim and I, met last week to review the new product, was to view first hand some of these potential pitfalls. While I did notice the Zestimate vs. Sale Price issue, the square footage discrepancy did not pop out at me during the presentation.

“Supporting New Business Models” and being an “Agent for Change” requires that someone jump in first to test the waters and assist with these little blips from the getgo, and not without the owner’s permission to do so.

To Galen, who notes that it is difficult to simply load up listings en masse, perhaps this is fair warning that adding a home for sale should NOT be done en masse. Every agent and every owner must consider the potential consequences of showing the Zestimate price side by side against their Asking Price, and be prepared to justify the basis for the differences between the two with regard to square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, finished vs. unfinished space, etc. and price.

This “FREE ADVERTISING” and the info contained “in the AD” is not entirely editable by the owner and the owner’s agent…so far anyway. I’m still working on it. Not a small matter, and one that must be addressed rather quickly if Zillow’s erroneous data is going to show side by side the owner’s “corrected” data.

So what did I forget to ask David G. last week? Did Pearl Harbor Day come up in any conversations concerning Zillow’s choice of unveiling the new upgrade? Did unveiling it at 9 p.m. on the 6th, camouflage any refererence to December 7th, when most would be waking up to see “God-Zillow” in their sheets with the morning paper?

The "BIGGER" news on Zillow.com

[photopress:boycott.gif,thumb,alignright]I was intrigued by Kevin Boer’s comment on Galen’s post predicting that the Major Brokerage Houses would be jumping in en masse and posting their listings on Zillow.com. Kevin predicts that it will be “the little guy” who will hold out. I predict it will actually be the other way around, with the bigger players finding an excuse NOT to post their listings on Zillow.com. Time will tell.

In my link post to all of the blog articles on Zillow’s overnight make-over, I found this obscure post which says what others are not saying:

“RED ALERT” Zillow Wants Our Listings. Before anyone posts their listings on Zillow-let’s get a consensus. I don’t want to aid these people at all, and by posting your listings, you are doing the legwork for them and I think it is a comakazie move. Before agents gang bang the free listing, maybe we can vote on this as a whole. What do you think? They’re not Realtor’s, so this is not an anti-trust violation, is it?”

Joanne Brown of Keller Williams, who wrote this blog article, tread on the thin ice others knew not to step on. But that’s the beauty of blogs. Every once in a while, someone just “let’s it all hang out” there in the blogosphere.

Zillow's new way to spite your neighbor

Mix Zillow’s amazing capacity to quietly market itself and its new feature (list your home on Zillow, FSBO or FSBAgent) and you have a great new service for driving traffic… to your annoying neighbor’s house. List their house at 25% below Zillow’s estimated value and invite people to come by to see the place anytime after 8 on weekdays. You could alternately ‘claim’ their house and hold it until they decide to sell, at which point you get to choose the price, at least on Zillow. To be fair, listing someone’s house has always been possible on Craigslist, but you never had to send in proof of ownership to be able to reclaim your house from them.

More seriously, I’ve been expecting Zillow to launch a service like this for quite a while, but frankly I thought it would take them a little bit longer to get their act together and figure out exactly how it would work.

A few thoughts:

1. Zilllow is making it a pain to bulk upload listings, which gives FSBOs exactly the same capacity to list as the biggest companies. They’re doing this for two reasons: Individuals are more likely to list (and look at ads and puruse the site) if their agent doesn’t say “we automatically list so you don’t have to worry” AND because it makes it harder for competitors to get the same information. If they allowed bulk submit, third party websites would do most of the work posting listings to all the free listings sites on the web. (So Greg, I disagree with you here) Expect an API for listing if people aren’t listing in high numbers (see number 3).

2. Many consumers already believed that Zillow had houses for sale, so this revelation won’t surprise the real estate-casual public.

3. Zillow has the best shot at getting the chicken or the egg (you need one to get the other). Most non-MLS sites (Trulia, Propsmart, ForSaleByOwner, etc.) have had the nasty problem of beginning with no listings and no searchers (no chickens or eggs). Each has tried a novel and somewhat successful way of getting searchers or listings – crawling sites for listings, offering free listings, pay-per click ads to lure searchers, etc. None of them seem to have hit the point of no return: the point at which searchers start using the site exclusively, causing any remaining listers to clamor for inclusion. Based on the marketing buzz alone, Zillow may be the first to hit this point. Once (if?) they hit some critical number (70%? 80%? 90% of listings?), the tide will turn and nearly all holdouts will list themselves. They can always include an API to increase inclusion, but I think they’d rather have agents and consumers list manually and add more information to their Zillow listings.

4. Zillow almost has enough buzz to get the holy grail of online real estate listings – actual people listing their own homes en masse and actual searchers using a non-MLS based site. Uninformed home buyers will probably use it to search for homes until they realize that, at least in the short run, Zillow doesn’t have a bunch of the houses that are for sale.

5. Many local MLS systems will probably fall by the wayside as the primary places that agents and consumers go to search for houses. This is because most of them have too many rules and regulations for using their data, which binds the hands of innovators.

6. Is ‘Make Me Move’ basically a slow motion auction with no end date? You state a “buy it now” price and wait for bidders to inch up to that price? It seems like a surefire way to see get a bunch of homes, but you never know if you’ll find that gem in the rough. It certainly won’t work for commodity-like homes in suburban developments or condos unless the “buy it now” price is really close to the market price.

7. Agents, you’re kidding yourself if you believe that Zillow isn’t going to make your life harder. When anyone can list their home on the web without paying $500 to some brokerage, it’s time to offer real services or get out of the game. Also, if people know someone who has successfully done a FSBO, it’ll seem a lot easier for them to do the same.

Agents and brokers of the future, you’re also kidding yourself if you believe that Zillow is responsible for shrinking commissions (they’re coming) and a changing industry because it’s not: Zillow is just the product of the web’s relentless market and information opening power. We are leaving the time of the agent-leads-consumer model in the real estate industry and we are entering the time of the agent-coaches-consumer model. More on how I hope to participate in this change in the coming weeks and months.

Update: I suspect Zillow will allow for bulk uploads in the future no matter what, but it makes sense to take things like this slowly. They will need to be especially vigilant to keep out listing spammers who could use an API to upload dozens of false homes.

Blog Articles on Zillow's New Upgrade

While Zillow is choking over there on the side trying to digest my listing info, here are some links to everyone I can find who is talking about tonight’s big news on Zillow.com

I threw in a couple of recent articles, posted just before tonight’s big news, that I found to be of interest. I will come back later and keep editing this post to include all articles posted until everyone is talked out.