I admit - I'm an iPhone junky now and I love the Zillow iPhone app. It's definitely one reason to make sure your listings are on Zillow if they aren't already.
If your listings still aren't on Zillow, there is now another reason they should be: mobile.
Two weeks ago Zillow release an iPhone application, and boy was it popular.
#1 Real Estate app
#1 free app in the Lifestyle category
#12 Top Free App
Over 300,000 downloads!
Now you may be thinking, but I don't have an iPhone, so this doesn't affect me. While you don't have an iPhone (still a blackberry user myself), guess what, millions of people who are buying and selling do. And at least 300,000 are interested in real estate, otherwise they wouldn't have download the application. When you list on Zillow, not only are your listings there for the 8.5 million people that visit the site each month, but now they can be accessed on-the-go as well. All of your contact information is right on your listings as well.
Imagine this: a women walking around her neighborhood, iPhone in hand. With the Zillow app, she can see an estimation of what each house is worth as she walks by. Then she comes to one of your listings. It is on Zillow, so she immediately has access all of the homes details, including price, description and multiple photos. After seeing all of this data, she pushes a button and can places a call to you, the listing agent. How qualified would that woman be?
Zillow is the number one most downloaded real estate app in the iTunes store. If you listings aren't on Zillow you are missing out on a big exposure opportunity. If they are on Zillow, you now have a mobile component to add to your listing presentation for your Sellers and yet another avenue to reach Buyers.
Find out more about posting your listings on Zillow by watching this short video.
And here is another video, if you would like to learn more about the iPhone app and its capabilities.
I just returned the NAR Midyear meeting, and once again the most popular subject I got asked about was the Zestimate. Where does the data come from and how accurate are they are the most common questions.
We at Zillow are working on creating a library of training videos, and I am please to now give you a training video on the Zestimate to help answer these questions. Actually, we created two videos on the subject.
This first video is geared toward Real Estate professional, and how the Zestimate works along side of your listing information.
The second video is geared more toward the home owner, buyer or seller. If you are working with a client that is using the Zestimate as an appraisal (verses just a starting point or an estimation), this could be a good video to pass along to them.
Both of these videos are available on You Tube
Also, please make sure to check out these other videos on various Zillow topics.
Watch John Reinhardt, president and CEO of Fillmore Real Estate in Brooklyn, explain why he loves the Zillow iPhone App, why he's switching from Blackberry to iPhone, and how he uses the Zillow app with his agents.
Off camera, John explained to me that even though Zestimates aren't always accurate, he feels it's critical for his agents to know about the Zestimate and to have any and all information that their clients have.
In an attempt to offer Zillow tips and tutorials in ways other than writing about them here on my blog, we just launched a video about Zillow Advice, our question and answer forum.
In the upcoming weeks we'll be releasing a series of how-to videos on various Zillow related topics as we build out a Zillow training library. Our hope is that the videos will give you a better understanding on how to use the various features and tools available on Zillow when connecting with the 8.5 million+ people who visit our site each month.
I'll keep this short and let you watch the video. But keep an eye out for future releases as well. Enjoy!
(how painful is it to watch yourself on video! haha)
Awhile ago I wrote a post citing 10 things you could do on Zillow. Not only has our traffic ballooned to 8 million monthly users since then, the opportunities to interact with audience have gotten richer as well. So here is an updated version 2.0 of this list, written to help you best use the site to gain incremental business along with highlighting some cool tools available on Zillow.
1) Create a free profile - Participating on Zillow all begins with the creation of a profile, which links to everything you do on the site. To get started, click "Register" in the upper right hand corner and walk thru the steps. If your Brokerage or a syndication site is feeding listings on your behalf, be sure to register using the same email address as they have on record for you. We use the email address to match listings to profiles. Be sure to include: your photo, all contact information, marketing text with unlimited links back into your website, geographic areas you work, and professional areas of specialization. For more detailed information on creating a profile, visit this tutorial, How To Build A Free Profile On Zillow.
2) Professional Directory - Once you have a profile, you are automatically in the Directory. This is why is it important to write marketing text with rich keywords, and to include you geographic and professional areas of specialization. These are keywords that consumers can search by when looking for a real estate professional.
3) Zillow Advice - This is an interactive forum where anyone can ask and answer a questions and is a great place to soft sell yourself leveraging your expertise. Your responses will be posted to the site, along with a link back to your profile. You are free to browse all the topics and discussions constantly be added to the site. But to work the most efficiently you can subscribe to be alerted via emailwhenever a question about a topic or geographic area you designated in added. Simply go to Zillow Advice, type in a topic such as "short sales" or "Chicago". At the top of the search results, click the link "Get Email Alerts". Please visit this tutorial if you would like more information on setting alerts.
• Tip - This is a bad answer: "Now is a great time to buy, call me and I'll tell you why". Not only will people totally overlook your answer, but responding this way may actually backfire causing people to say negative things about such an uninformative, hard sell. This is a better answer "In Wicker Park we are seeing annualized returns of 3%, however compare this to a 10 year return of 19%. But each street in Wicker Park is different. If you let me know what street you are on, I can customize this information even further to show you returns people have experienced on your particular street. The hard sell is dead with social media.
4) Post Listings - If you just have a few listings, you can submit listings to the site for free manually. The easiest way to do this is to search for the address, then click "Tell Us Its For Sale" in the left hand column. If you have over 200 listings, you may want to consider setting up an XML feed, find out more about how to do this at www.ZillowFeeds.com. Also, we work with a number of listing syndication services, so if you are using sites like Postlets, Vflyer, Listhub or Point2, your listings are appearing on Zillow. On each listings you can have up to 50 photos, so if the service you are using doesn't send that many photos, you can log on to the site and add them.
5) Widgets - Want to make your site content richer with spending a dime, then add a widget! You don't need programming knowledge to do this. Simply visit this page, click on the widget you'd like install, scroll to the bottom of the page to copy the code, and paste it into the appropiate area of your site. (good tutorial on how to add widgets on Active Rain). Some of own most popular widgets are: Mortgage Rates, Payment Calculators, and Local Home Value Trends. See the side of this blog for examples of what these look like.
6) Local Home Value Reports - Zillow has about 80 million homes on the site, of which we are constantly monitoring the valuation trends. Each quarter we aggregate all this data to provide national, metro, and very local trend reports for approximately 160 metropolian areas in the US. One on the things that make these reports unique is that we are using data from ALL homes on the site, not just the ones that are on the market or have recently sold. If you are into data methodology, here is a post about how the methodlogy of these reports compare to Case Schiller or OFHEO. On these reports we track how homes in the country performed, down to how homes performed in a particular ZIP- with a 3 month, 1 year, 5 year, and 10 year perspective.
7) Zillow Mortgage Marketplace - As Real Estate Agents, this area won't help you sell houses, but it may help move the transaction along. If you are a Lender, sign up for this incredible lead source that is earing Lenders business daily How Zillow's mortgage is different - A finanace shopper goes online and fills out information about their situation (loan product desired, credit and financial info), with the exception that they don't provide their name or contact information. Then registered Lenders give customized quotes. The consumer then comes back to Zillow, reviews the quotes, and is in the driver's seat as to who they would like to contact for further information. Zillow also aggregates all the quotes that are consistantly being made, creating real time charts of the type of rates people are actually being quoted.
8) Featured Lisitngs - There is so much you can do for free on Zillow, then how do we make money? By offering those who want to stand out of the site even more, the chance to buy advertising. Think about the last time you did a search on Google, you probably clicked on something on the first page (verses the page 3 or 4). Promote your listings to the first page of Zillow search results by Featuring them. Featured listings typically receive about 500x more traffic than regular listings. The cost runs about $10/month/listing. To find out more, call (866) 324-4005.
9) Showcase Ads - These are ZIP code targeted ads, in which you can promote yourself or your listings, editable at any time throughout the month. There are two ads on each page in the right hand column. Within these two spaces, you can purchase 25, 50, 75, or 100% of the inventory of available impressions - depending on your budget. Cost varies by the amount of traffic available in your ZIP code. You can create your ad and find out the cost by visiting this Advertisers section of the site. These ads link where ever you dictate.
• Tip - While advertising yourself can have branding effects, typically ads of listings experience better click thru rates - or direct more traffic to your site. Use strong Calls To Action on the ads. For example: Open House this weekend, Just Listed, Foreclosure Situation, Builder Incentives, Recently Price Reduced, Live In "hot neighborhood". Then change the ads out as the situation warrants. We are seeing that the more information you include in the ad (price, neighborhood, beds, baths) the BETTER the click thru rate. Also, this is obvious, but make sure you use a GREAT picture.
10) Accuracy Chart - Ever hear the question from buyers and sellers, "But Zillow said.."? Using the Accuracy Chart posted online, specific to each County in the US, you'll be able to answer this question by saying "Zillow also says they have an err rate of X% in our County, and are within 5% of a home's sale price x% of the time, 10% of the time they are within X%, and 20% of the time they are within X%. This is a great tool to use, along with the customization information that you prepare for your clients. For more information on the topic of Zestimates, please visit this post "How Accurate Are Zillow Zestimates?".
You can find links to all these things, plus more, at www.ZillowPros.com.
Two years ago when launching our first round of community features, including Home Q&A, we included a feature to “tell us it’s for sale” – figuring that many conversations start around homes on the market, and if the home isn’t listed on Zillow then the community might want to notate that it’s for sale. Some brokers who didn’t like the feature argued that it allowed someone other than the listing agent to “advertise” the listing, which is a no-no. Our position was always that it is a conversation piece about that home, the type of thing that someone in the community would say to someone else – “hey did you see that the house down the street is for sale for $500,000?”.
Well, after many conversations with our brokerage partners, we’ve decided to pull the plug on this feature. It wasn’t lighting the world on fire anyway -- only 4,323 listings on the entire Web site were reported for sale by someone other than the listing agent or owner, less than 0.1% of our listings. So rather than continue to apologize for and explain away this issue to important partners, we're listening and we're yanking it.
This decision has a lot of parallels to our recent decision to drop our real estate brokerage licenses. When we first launched Zillow three years ago, we obtained real estate brokerage licenses in all 50 states at great expense because our lawyers told us it was the prudent thing to do, given the fact that we provide a Zestimate value on homes. This caused great consternation and fear in the brokerage community – more fear than we even realized at the time. It wasn’t until after we announced that we were dropping our licenses that it became clear to us just how much of an issue this had been in the industry.
Dropping “tell us it’s for sale” is a similar story. We're constantly listening to what consumers, agents, brokers and lenders tell us, and in this case everyone told us they didn’t like the feature and didn’t use it. So it’s toast.
Two years ago when launching our first round of community features, including Home Q&A, we included a feature to “tell us it’s for sale” – figuring that many conversations start around homes on the market, and if the home isn’t listed on Zillow then the community might want to notate that it’s for sale. Some brokers who didn’t like the feature argued that it allowed someone other than the listing agent to “advertise” the listing, which is a no-no. Our position was always that it is a conversation piece about that home, the type of thing that someone in the community would say to someone else – “hey did you see that the house down the street is for sale for $500,000?”.
Well, after many conversations with our brokerage partners, we’ve decided to pull the plug on this feature. It wasn’t lighting the world on fire anyway -- only 4,323 listings on the entire Web site were reported for sale by someone other than the listing agent or owner, less than 0.1% of our listings. So rather than continue to apologize for and explain away this issue to important partners, we're listening and we're yanking it.
This decision has a lot of parallels to our recent decision to drop our real estate brokerage licenses. When we first launched Zillow three years ago, we obtained real estate brokerage licenses in all 50 states at great expense because our lawyers told us it was the prudent thing to do, given the fact that we provide a Zestimate value on homes. This caused great consternation and fear in the brokerage community – more fear than we even realized at the time. It wasn’t until after we announced that we were dropping our licenses that it became clear to us just how much of an issue this had been in the industry.
Dropping “tell us it’s for sale” is a similar story. We're constantly listening to what consumers, agents, brokers and lenders tell us, and in this case everyone told us they didn’t like the feature and didn’t use it. So it’s toast.
Todd Carpenter! This was an incredibly smart position for NAR to get on the payroll and an even smarter hiring choice. Not only is Todd very skilled in the area of social media, but he comes to the table with an incredible reputation and following. This will definitely help jump start NAR's reputation in the blog world.
On many of the negative posts I have read about NAR, simply having a someone come in as a voice representing the organization could have diverted a lot of the negativity. And now that this voice is Todd's, someone who has demonstrated a tremendous amount of creditability in the past, some blogs that bring up negative points will have a new dimension as Todd jumps into game.
I don't envy the road ahead of him, as I think it will be long and hard. I just hope NAR gives him the runway to do the things that a social manager needs to be doing to be successful. One of those things is to contribute meaning information with a high degree of transparency. Not something we have seen from NAR in the social media space in the past.
Good luck to Todd in his new role, and good luck to Todd who is moving to Chicago in the winter! Not sure which is going to be harder... but I am sure he knows some good Realtors to help him with both moves!
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
hiring choice. Not only is Todd very skilled in the area of social media, but he comes to the table with an incredible reputation and following. This will definitely help jump start NAR's reputation in the blog world.
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