Drew's Blog

Zillow's new photo viewing on map page = important to include many photos

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:46:34 -0500

Via Spencer Rascoff (Zillow):

We changed the user interface on Zillow for looking at photos on the Map & List page the other day, and it's pretty slick. The new site design makes it more important than ever to include all of your listing's photos -- we allow up to 50 photos.

Take a look:

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New! More Exposure For Your Active Rain Blog!

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:00:30 -0500

Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):

There are 13,000 of you who have an Active Rain blog AND active profiles on Zillow. As of today, and thru collaboration with the good folks at AR, you now have a link from your Zillow profile to your Active Rain blog! Just one more way people can find the great content so many of you produce.

If you have an active, PROFESSIONAL (not a regular user) account on Zillow, a link to your blog will automatically appear. But we didn't stop there, you can now also add your Twitter handle, a link to your Facebook profile and a link to your LinkedIn information.

I am really excited about this change because it is so important to tie everything you are doing socially, together on the web, to help build your online reputation.

Steps to edit/add your Profile:

1) If you don't already have an active account, here is a link to start building your free Zillow profile.

2) Log on to the site and go to your Profile. Click the Edit button.

3) Next, simply add your information in the respective fields.

4) And you are all done!

Big thanks to Active Rain for making this happen! Also, don't forget that you can include even more (followed) links within the marketing text of your profile. For example, link to some of your favorite or more helpful posts to drive even more traffic to them.
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Miami Median Value Per Sq Foot

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:25:01 -0500

Median Value / sq. ft.

More Miami Home Values

Even More Reasons To Add Multiple Photos To Your Listings

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:49:05 -0500

All the listing agents reading this, please do me a favor and pay someone to take photos for you if you don't have time to do it yourself.

Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):

We all know that people want to see lots of photos on online listings (Zillow lets you upload up to 50 per listing). There was a small update made to Zillow this week that makes the number of photos on a listing more obvious.

Take your Realtor hat off for a minute and put your consumer hat on. Say you did a search for listings and this is what you got back. Knowing that people usually have a finite amount of time they spend online and won't look at every house on a page, which of these do you think will get more looks?

(Scroll down for a quick video on how to edit photos)

How to add, delete, or edit photos:

New Local Market Information Widget For Your Website Or Blog

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:37:21 -0500

This really is the coolest widget we've put out yet!!

Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):

Last week, Zillow launched our Local Pages, look for the new tab in the top bar. Here you'll find tons of local data about not only homes that are for sale, but all homes in a market. You can also find information such as demographics, population make up, and even see any local pics that may have been uploaded. This week, we took all of that information and made it available in a free widget you can use on your website or blog. Look in the right hand column of my blog to see one of the ways you can use this info.

It is easy to install. First visit this page where we list all the widgets available.

Chose the area for which you want the information. You can go as macro as the city of Chicago, or down to a particular neighborhood.

Then chose what information you want displayed. Here is your menu of choices:

Do you want a large or smaller widget?

The code is automatically generated for you. Just hit the 'copy' button.

You can inset the widget on any website or blog. But if you want to put it on your Active Rain blog, simply go to the Settings area of the My Home tab. Then paste into the blog description and you are done!

Great, local, free content that will automatically be updated for you!

It's Time For Free Beer Again! Beer For Bloggers in San Francisco, CA

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:03:40 -0500

Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):

Where does the year go?  Inman's Blogger Connect 2009 in San Francisco is here again already, which means Zillow is once again helping kick the event off with Beer For Bloggers.

Going to Blogger Connect? Want free beer?  Want to meet other cool bloggers from around the country?

Then join us:

Tuesday, August 4, 6-8 PM

The Mighty  119 Utah St, San Francisco, CA 94103

Just stare into Bob's eyes below (taken from previous event) and he'll hypnotize you into coming.....

Also pictured:

Brian Block

Tom Plant

Post Your Listings On Zillow And Get MOBILE Exposure

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:07:19 -0500

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.

Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):

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.

"The Zestimate" - the video

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:54:44 -0500

Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):

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.

Brooklyn Broker loves his Zillow iPhone App

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:46:00 -0500

Awesome video!

Via Spencer Rascoff (Zillow):

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.

VIDEO: On CNBC discussing "shadow inventory" and negative equity

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:01:42 -0500

From Zillow COO Spencer Rascoff

Via Spencer Rascoff (Zillow):

How To Use Zillow Advice - The Video!

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:25:54 -0500

Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):

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)

10 Ways Real Estate Professionals Can Use Zillow v2.0

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:07:37 -0500

This is a great overview of how RE Pros can use Zillow to their advantage (written by my colleague Sara Bonert):

Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):

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 email whenever 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.

You Speak, We Listen: Non-listing Agents Can No Longer Mark a Home as “For Sale”

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:19:44 -0600

From Zillow's COO Spencer Rascoff:

Via Spencer Rascoff (Zillow):

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.

You Speak, We Listen: Non-listing Agents Can No Longer Mark a Home as “For Sale”

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:19:19 -0600

From Zillow's COO Spencer Rascoff:

Via Spencer Rascoff (Zillow):

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.

How to Make a Home Affordable?

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:57:31 -0600

Well, luckily, Katie on Zillow's PR team put together a great overview over at Zillow Blog - Making Home Affordable.

NAR Welcomes New Manager Of Social Media

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:55:29 -0600

NAR just made it official - Todd Carpenter is their new social media manager!

Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):

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!

Zillow's New Home Values Widget

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:57:18 -0600

It seems home values are on everyone's mind right now -- partly due to Obama's Housing Plan and the fact that mortgage rates are low and refinance activity is skyrocketing. Consumers are interested in market data and with the new Home Values Widget agents, brokers, and bloggers can instantly add up-to-date neighborhood, ZIP code, or city market information to their web properties (for free) by copying and pasting some simple html code. You can see an example of our new home values widget on the top of the right sidebar and I've embedded it in this post below. Whether you specialize in real estate in Boston, Washington DC, or Miami, or live on the West coast and focus on San Francisco, Seattle, or San Diego -- we have a solution for you. In fact, the Home Values Widget works anywhere we have a Zillow Home Value Index. All widgets also include our free co-branding technology to keep you top of mind should someone click through to Zillow from the widget. For those who want or need more flexibility regarding your integration, the same neighborhood home value data is available via our API (here is an example API integration on Banks.com). I was on Twitter Wednesday night and decided to find some early adopters by tweeting the news of a new home values widget. Here are the geeks that I found that were among the first to install the widget:

If you have installed the widget, please leave a comment with a link to where we can see it. If there are other widgets that you'd like us to build, please let us know what they are. We have some ideas as to what we think would be cool, but your feedback is invaluable.

My thoughts on the housing bailout plan

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:58:02 -0600

Some good thoughts by Zillow's COO

Via Spencer Rascoff (Zillow):

Prepping for my CNBC appearance tonight forced me to dig into the housing bailout plan in a way that I might not otherwise have found time to do. I find this stuff really fascinating because it's at this beautiful intersection of several of my favorite disciplines: politics, economics and real estate. I majored in Government as an undergrad at Harvard, and studied Economics there as well, so I enjoy playing armchair economist and political theorist every now and then.

Here are my thoughts on today's announcement. And let me preface this by saying these are MY thoughts on the bailout plan, not Zillow's official thoughts. (Zillow officially doesn't have an opinion on this.)

First, today's plan will NOT turn around the housing market. It WILL somewhat reduce the number of new foreclosures (though I think many people are overestimating the reduction it will cause, considering the fact that it only applies to Freddie/Fannie loans which are only 60% of the market, and it only applies to people with a small amount of negative equity. And it's voluntary.) Reducing the tidal wave of foreclosures is good for home prices because it reduces inventory (or avoids further increases in inventory). This is why I applauded the huge drop in new housing starts announced today.

Foreclosure prevention will somewhat help the housing market stabilize, and it will obviously help the homeowners in question. But if you're looking for a REAL stimulus to the housing market, keep looking. The fact is that two things need to happen before home prices stabilize and start increasing:

1. We need to see stabilization in the labor market. Specifically, employees need to be able to stop worrying about lost wages from underemployment, and unemployment needs to return to the 5-7% range.

There were three pieces of big housing news today: 1) the Obama housing bailout plan, 2) the reduction in housing starts, and 3) the Fed put out a new forecast of unemployement for 2009: 8.8% by the end of the year. Frankly, this third piece of news which was the least reported is probably the most important of the three in terms of impact on the housing market.

2. Homebuyers have to feel confident that we're at or near a bottom. Zillow's research shows that a striking 70% of American homeowners think their home will increase in value or stay flat over the next 6 months. But buyers aren't walking the walk. Credit goes to Brian Brady for calling my attention to this point today. Too many buyers are sitting on the sidelines, not making offers because they don't want to buy too early. We're not going to have a housing market turnaround until those buyers start to make offers, and they're not going to make offers until they feel that we've already hit a bottom.

More specifically, here's what I like about today's plan:

- Donald Trump Jr and I agree on this much: it's a good thing that bankruptcy judges will now be permitted to rewrite the terms of mortgages in bankruptcy court. Corporate bankruptcy judges have always been able to rewrite material contracts when companies file for bankruptcy protection -- witness the countless labor contracts for bankrupt airlines that judges have ripped up in bankruptcy. It's about time that personal bankruptcy judges have the same latitude.

Some have argued that this will increase borrowing costs to mortgage holders in the future because the risk associated with a potential loan being able to be negated in court will have to be priced into all loans. Yes, I concede that in theory this is true. So what? It's true of corporate borrowing costs also, in theory, and life goes on. If an individual goes bankrupt, the contract detailing their single biggest liability -- their mortgage -- needs to be on the table for a bankruptcy proceeding to address.

- I like the incentive that the government is giving to loan servicers to try to work out troubled mortgages directly with borrowers. Alex Perriello gave a great speech at the NAR Convention in Orlando imploring the thousands of Realtors in the audience to spread the word among their client list: before you're foreclosed upon, please speak with your lender! Alex said that in between half and 2/3 of all foreclosures, the lender and borrower never even speak to one another. He pointed out that frequently borrowers are embarassed or confused, so they do nothing. The government's actions today -- offering a few thousand dollars to the borrower and servicer for each loan that is modified -- will definitely spark those conversations.

What I don't like about the plan:

- the part of the plan that I like least is the one that introduces enormous moral hazard on the part of borrowers: it basically rewards homeowners who fall behind on their mortgage by paying them a few thousand bucks to stay CURRENT on their mortgage. I think that creates strange incentives.

- To be honest, the whole dang plan is a little hard for me to swallow because I've always been a believer in free markets: if a foreclosure is meant to happen, or a company is meant to go bankrupt, then let it happen. It's impossible to hold back the tides. HOWEVER, we're living in extraordinary times, and my economic liberterianism is now outweighed by my pragmatism.

I also have to use this opportunity to point out that on March 23, 2006, I wrote the following post titled "The Tidal Wave Is Coming" on Zillowblog:

"I’m usually a pretty optimistic guy, but I’ve started to see some scary things on the horizon. And I’ve gotta pass it on. Check this out: 9.4% of all mortgage borrowers now have no equity or negative equity in their home, and 29% of new mortgages last year had no equity. $800 billion worth of mortgages owe more than their homes are worth, and that’s optimistic since it assumes no reduction in home values. One study estimates that if home prices fell by 10%, the share of 2005 homebuyers with negative equity would shoot up to 48%. Yikes! What happens when all those interest only mortgages flip from their low fixed rates to a much higher variable rate? A lot of homeowners who bought houses beyond their means a few years ago via low introductory rate ARMs are suddenly going to find themselves unable to pay their new higher mortgage. And guess what? They have no equity in their house. So they’ll have to sell and/or dramatically reduce their consumption. This is a disaster waiting to happen. This analysis says it all: 'Many homes were sold with Adjustable Rate Mortgages in 2003 and 2004. Now, we are seeing more than $2 trillion…of these mortgages coming up for a reset in their mortgage rates. My back of the napkin calculations suggest interest payments are going to eat up at least another $3 billion a month in consumer spending capacity over the next year. In a $12 trillion economy, this is not all that large, but it will suck almost 1/2 of 1% of consumer spending potential out of the economy.'

Sorry to be such a downer, but I’m worried about the impact that this will have on housing prices and more importantly on the overall American (and global?) economy."

Wow, sometimes I hate being right.

Recap of the Zillow vs Trulia Conference Call

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:15:07 -0600

I thought this post from my colleague Sara Bonert might be of interest to some of you:

Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):

The audio file is now available for the Zillow vs Trulia call that went down last week. It was a great call and definitely worth listening to if you want more information about both sites. You'll hear us talk about the pros and cons of each site, and some overall social networking strategies.

Zillow vs Trulia mp3 file

I wanted to comment on and link to a few of the reports, stats and buzz words that were mentioned during the call.

At the beginning of the call, a WAV group report commissioned by ListHub about quantity and quality of leads from syndicated listings was brought up.

I blogged about this study a few months ago, but here is the over arching message that I take away from it: With listing syndication, Trulia sends more clicks to Realtor sites but the clicks Zillow sends convert at a much higher rate. In fact, the numbers show in this report show that you would have to get 5 times as many clicks from Trulia to equal the number of hard leads, or contacts, you generate from fewer clicks with Zillow. So Zillow helps you work more efficiently.

Throughout the call, engagement and site demographics, specific to the luxury market, were discussed.

In terms of demographics, Zillow has the most affluent audience among real estate media sites. About 90% of the people who visit Zillow already own a home (this also means they would have a house to sell, are likely a move up buyer, or are in the secondary home market). The average household income of a Zillow user is approximately $88,878 with a credit score of 755. These are higher demographics than Forbes.com, and higher than all of the top trafficked real estate websites. (source: Neilsons)

With respect to engagement that Fran brought up a number of times, I'll use a third party source to address this topic. I pulled Comscore numbers for January 2009 and found not only do we simply have a bigger audience, but they come back to the site much more frequently, spend more time on the site, and view almost twice as many pages per session.

I realize that many people aren't high on Zillow because we have Zestimates, or automated valuations, on the site, so I know I went into the ring with a disadvantage. I highly encourage you to read a post I wrote called How Accurate Are Zillow's Zestimates. It may help you with a buyer or seller that says "but Zillow says"... At the end of the day these numbers are what is delivering a huge, unique audience to our site every month - many of whom are just starting to think about their real estate situation and aren't yet working with anyone. We don't just use your listings to create content on the site. But people are also coming for our unique and rich mortgage information, our interactive Forums, and to view the huge amounts of data available on the site- and of course they want to see listing data too.

At the end of the day, there is a vast amount of marketing that you can do on both sites - and most of it is for free. I hope this call and this blog post helps make you more educated about both sites. I hope it helps you have more informed conversations about online marekting and make better informed decisions when deciding how to spend your marketing dollar and time.

To view everything you can do on Zillow, please visit www.ZillowPros.com.

You can vote for the 'winner' of the call here.

The $15,000 Tax Credit

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 22:17:20 -0600

There are some details on the $15,000 tax credit over at Zillow Blog for those interested. What do you think -- will this have a positive impact on turning the housing market around?

Bloodhound Unchained Seattle: A Prequel to RE BarCamp

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 18:11:03 -0600

Looking forward to seeing a good crowd in Seattle in February!

Via America's #1 Mortgage Broker/858-777-9751:

RE BarCamp Seattle has a time and a date. From Todd Carpenter:

Rich Jacobson and Brad Andersohn from Active Rain, along with Drew Meyers from Zillow have established the basics. A date and venue. February 13 at Zillow Headquarters. This happens to follow a Bloodhound Unchained preview event held the day before, also at Zillow headquarters, and also free!

Greg Swann and I are pretty stoked about heading to the Emerald City. Scott Cowan signed up for Bloodhound Unchained Phoenix ‘O8 but had to decline participation to tend to familial duties. Since then, Scott’s been lobbying us to head up to Seattle to out on our “Mini-Unchained Event” for Coffee Bean Town. Last month, I told him we’d gladly come if he could round up a venue and a group of eager people. Scott called the folks at Zillow and we arranged to be a prequel to Seattle RE BarCamp.

Our event will be from 1PM until 5:30 PM, on Thursday, February 12, 2008, at the Zillow Headquarters. We’ll be talking about Direct Marketing (online and offline), Social Media Marketing, and Blogging. David Gibbons and Rich Jacobson agreed to speak, as well. Marlow Harris raised her hand to attend but I’m hopeful to have her to speak.

Our concluding session will be a debate between Glenn Kelman of Redfin.com and Greg Swann.

GET MORE INFORMATION

Bookworm Meme

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:00:57 -0600

Here's my bookworm meme...which Elvis brought upon me.

Want a Job in Real Estate? Start Blogging

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:16:43 -0500

I've been thinking about writing this story for awhile, but the latest news that NAR is looking for a social media manager finally got me to put my fingers to the keyboard. The list of bloggers from the RE.net finding corporate jobs in the real estate industry seems to be getting longer by the day...

(if I missed anyone that should be on this list, please leave a comment and I'll add them) As I mentioned on my blog back in 2006, a blog can be a great resume and a killer way to brand yourself. That's definitely playing out in the RE.net. And now NAR is looking for a social media manager. From Monster.com:

MAJOR DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES (NOT ALL-INCLUSIVE): The Manager of Social Media will ensure that NAR has the knowledge and skills to guide NAR staff and members in creating, facilitating, and participating effectively in key conversations about our organization, our issues, and our members that are conducted on blogs and other online social media channels. This position requires a high-energy, self-directed, deadline-oriented individual who has exceptional communication skills and is able to:

Monitor real estate industry and related social media

Facilitate NAR’s participation in external blogs and social media

Maintain, evolve, and enforce NAR’s social media policies and guidelines

Train NAR staff and elected leaders about how to write for blogs and other forms of social media

Monitor existing NAR blogs and create new ones as needed to foster conversations about relevant topics or issues.

Measure the effectiveness of NAR’s social media efforts.

So -- who is the latest RE.net blogger that is going to be poached for this job? Originally posted on the Geek Estate Blog.

What do you want to discuss at REBarCamp?

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:16:07 -0500

For those who haven't heard of REBarCamp (where have you been??), you must have missed the San Francisco REBarCamp in July. As background for this post, I suppose it would help to explain what "RE" BarCamp is:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. "RE" BarCamp takes the traditional conference model usually focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats, and focusing in on real estate technology, new business models and more.

The next REBarCamp will be in Houston in two weeks on October 22nd -- I hope you'll join us for the fun. Though the exact agenda will not be finalized until the day of the conference (part of the fun with a BAR Camp is that the agenda is put together by the actual attendees), we thought it would be good to get some early feedback to get an idea of the type of real estate content attendees want to see covered by panel discussions. In the spirit of being a bit geeky, I've set up Google Moderator (a somewhat recent release by Google) session called Houston Bar Camp that we can use to gather suggestions and feedback regarding desired REBarCamp topics. For those not familiar with Google Moderator, it's a software tool to crowd source group questions -- and all you need is a Google account to participate. If you are drawing a blank regarding interesting topics to cover, please vote on which existing topics/suggestions sound interesting. If there are individuals or companies who would like to sponsor, you can still get in on the sponsorship action for $250 (just leave a comment here and Mike will get back to you). (all paid sponsors as of the close of business on Thursday to be included on the event T-Shirt). Below are the current sponsors: Hope to see you all in Houston in a few weeks!! Originally posted on Geek Estate Blog.

Are your listings helping or hurting your Google ranking?

Drew Meyers (Zillow) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:34:07 -0500

As an agent, SEO should certainly be on your radar. Here's a post (written by my boss) that should shed some light on how your listings can help, or hurt in some cases, your own SEO.

Via David Gibbons:

Syndicating listings to 3rd party websites should be part of your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. It's a simple formula; you allow your listings to be published on other websites in exchange for a link back to your site. Link building, as the SEOs call it, is by far the most effective way to get good content to show up on Google's first page and listings are a broker's best option for link building. You may have heard it said that 'content is king' of SEO but links are queen. If two sites have similar content, the one with the most links typically wins.

The twist in this tail is that sending your listings to most 3rd party real estate listings sites is not helping your site's SEO and may well be hurting it. Many listings sites employ technologies to ensure that your site is invisible to Google. There are a lot of sneaky tricks to this but to keep it simple, there's one main thing that you should be checking your links for - and that is nofollow tags.

Checking links for nofollow tags.

The oldest trick in the book is easy to spot. If a 3rd party site has added the tag "rel=nofollow" to your links then the search engines will not follow the link and will not find your site. For example, this link to my profile on Zillow is followed by google but this link is not yet they go to the same place. You can check for nofollow tags by clicking on View --> Source in your browser window to check your links. I personally prefer to use a firefox plugin that highlights nofollow links for me. You can get the plugin I'm using here - when it's installed, right-click the "q" in your firefox tool tray and select "highlight nofollow links" and it will cause nofollow links to be highlighted in red. For example, Prudential Northwest and Mike Kass (pictured left) have invested in showcase ads on Realtor.com but they receive no SEO benefit from any of the links to their websites from those listings. Mike and Prudential Northwest will get more SEO benefit from this blog post than they do from syndicating their listings to Realtor.com.

Note: when you dive into this, you are going to see a lot of red links and it's important to remember that they are not all evil! There are some good reasons for using nofollow and google has clear guidelines that explain how nofollow should be used. All you need to know is that none of the good reasons for using nofollow apply to links on syndicated listings and honestly, it's surprising that this hostile behavior is the norm in our industry. Nofollow is the most common mechanism used to ensure that listings partners don't get SEO benefit from the links on their listings but there are two other technical issues related to this problem that I'll touch on very briefly here ...

Checking links for 301 redirects.

It's quite common that websites move their pages around. When they do that, and to ensure that old links still work, the old URLs are redirected to their new location. Redirects are how you sometimes end up on a web site that's different to the link you thought that you clicked on and are quite commonly used by real estate sites to send click traffic through an intermediary server for counting purposes (Zillow does this). Redirects will only be followed by search engines if they are of a specific type; namely a 301 redirect. Redirected links come in many flavors but all you need to look for is the 301 - links to pages with other types of redirects may as well have a nofollow tag because search engines will ignore them. Checking for 301 redirects is as easy as entering the listing's link into a form and reading the results. There are numerous free redirect checkers online - I'm currently using this one.

Beware of Java Script

If the link to your listing from a 3rd party website looks something like this: "javascript:noop();" you are probably not getting any SEO benefit from it. Search engines can't read the dynamic content that javascript delivers (which is why AJAX has lost some of its lustre.) I should add that there's currently some debate about whether google is learning to read javascript but from what I've seen, it's not happening much and it should be simple for you and your listings partner to test - just check whether a unique URI to one of your your listings gets indexed by Google (i.e. search for it) after it's syndicated to a site (like Roost) that uses javascript.

Now, go and check on your listings!

Full disclosure: I work at Zillow.com. Listings posted to Zillow earn SEO benefit for your web site but don't just take my word for it, go and test the links to your listings on Zillow.com for nofollows, javascript and 301 redirects. And then go and check the links from your listings on other sites and let me know what you find - you may be surprised.

Update: ... and this is a followed link to the mortgage website findmyloanonline. If you want to know why it's here you'll have to read the comments.