I'm pleased to post our June traffic stats. As readers of this blog already know, I do this every month (or at least every month that I find time to do it).

First, a note about the data: at Zillow, we strongly believe that the only reliable way to measure traffic is with your own internal traffic logs. Publicly available sources like Comscore, Nielsen, Hitwise, Alexa and Quantcast all take small panels of Internet users and extrapolate to guess at your overall traffic. While we're very pleased that Hitwise and Nielsen consistently report that Zillow is now the 2nd largest real estate site on the Web, we still believe that internal measurement is more reliable. So the data below comes from Omniture, which is a public company to whom we pay a small fortune for their site analytics package. Again: because this is plugged into our actual website, it's much more reliable than Comscore or any other public reporting.

Without further ado, the highlights:

• In June 2009, Zillow had 8.5M unique visitors, up 67% year-over-year.
  
• In June 2009, Zillow had 14.1M total visitors, up 60% year-over-year.

• Our largest city is Los Angeles where we had 1.5M total visitors, up 38% yoy. New York was #2 with 1.1M visitors (up 79% yoy), and San Francisco was #3 with 1M visitors
• Our traffic in Washington DC grew the most of any large city, almost doubling yoy (up 91%) to 572K visitors

• The penetration stats are pretty amazing also. Nationwide, about 5% of all US residents visited Zillow in June. In San Francisco, 16% of all residents visited in June; in Seattle, 11.3% of all residents visited in June.
  • While we don't know what % of homebuyers in a given city visited, it's safe to assume that with these types of penetration stats for ALL residents, we must also have very high penetration stats among buyers.
  • Also, the California of Association of Realtors just released a study showing that 55% of all Internet buyers (which is pretty much everyone) use Zillow -- more than Yahoo Real Estate or Craigslist. (Trulia didn't register enough buyers to be on CAR's list.)
    
  • Our own research shows that about 2/3 of our visitors are in the market to buy or sell a home, so Zillow definitely isn't just for voyeurs.

Search for your city below in the upper right of the docs below to see how much traffic we have. And if you want to talk to someone at Zillow about how to increase your presence, please call 866-324-4005.

Zillow Visitors by City - June '09_cities by Size Zillow Visitors by City - June '09_per Capita

Every day, millions of people are communicating online through blogs, social networks and news outlets. All it takes is one negative blog post, forum message or online comment and your hard-earned reputation could be damaged. As a real estate professional using the Internet to grow your business and market yourself to a network of future buyers and sellers, you need to think strategically about what you do and don’t say online.

Here are five tips I’ve gleaned from my social marketing experience at Zillow.com that will help you manage your reputation and communicate your expertise online.

1. Don’t abuse the anonymity of the Internet. If you wouldn’t say it in real life, don’t say it online, even anonymously. This is the golden rule of online relationship maintenance. Before diving head-first into an argument, set some boundaries for yourself and pick your battles wisely. You have a professional reputation to protect - consumers don’t.

2. Acknowledge your (perceived) bias. When entering into a new conversation, introduce yourself and proactively declare your bias. I usually start with “Hi, it’s Spencer from Zillow.com.” This will establish an air of transparency and build credibility around your comments. If you're an agent, consumers will immediately assume you're overly optimistic about real estate values and are always going to promote a transaction (since your compensation is commission-driven). Rather than try to dissuade someone from having that opinion of your motives, it's better to acknowledge it up front. Also, when relevant, also link to your professional profile on Zillow, LinkedIn, etc.

3. Correct your mistakes publicly and quickly. If you’ve made a mistake, seek out opportunities to say, “I was wrong,” and explain how you’ve corrected your error. Always respect your fellow bloggers-even when they have opposing viewpoints-and be mindful of the fact that every individual has a right to their own opinion.

4. Long live the soft sell. Online community boards and advice forums like Zillow Advice are not designed as a place to spam your virtual business card and run. Instead, take the time to authentically engage your audience with the “soft sell” approach to answering their questions. Leave comments that display your experience, suggest useful resources and reinforce your position as an industry expert.

5. Read (much) more than you write. Reply to more posts than you originate. Listen to what others are saying about you and your product. For every post you write, you should read 10 others. Your posts and comments will be much more effective if you first listen and then respond to what others are saying before you try to start conversations. Keeping your digital footprint clean takes some effort, but it’s a highly effective, low-cost way to build your personal brand and expand your online presence to connect with future clients.

Remember, being active online is a great way to grow your business, but it's also a lot of fun. Consumers can tell whether you're enjoying yourself or if you're just trying to work a transaction. So be yourself, have fun, and I'll see you around the RE.net.

[Note: I wrote a similar article to this one for RIS Media on June 17, 2009, "5 Ways to Better Manage Your Reputation in Online Forums".]

Zillow had another record month for traffic in May 2009 -- 8.9 million unique visitors, up 72% year-over-year.

(Note: Zillow measures our traffic using Omniture logs which track the actual usage of our website, rather than a small panel of users which are then extrapolated to try to guess the actual usage.)

Here are some other interesting tidbits from our record month in May:

• 17.1% of residents in the San Francisco - Oakland - San Jose area visited Zillow in the month of May. 17%!! That's crazy.
  
• 12.2% of Seattle residents visited in May.
• 11.7% of San Diego residents visited in May.
• Our traffic is growing 80% year-over-year in New York and 88% year-over-year in Washington DC
• Our largest city in terms of visitor traffic is Los Angeles, where 1.6 million visitors came to the site in May.
  

Here are our traffic statistics by city. Please check your city to see how big we are in your neck of the woods. Type your city into the "search" box in the upper right of the file here.

[These numbers are total visitors, not unique visitors. The shorthand math is that we get about 2 visitors per visitor, so if you want to get to the unique visitor count in your city, divide the numbers below by 2.]

And remember that you can speak with someone on our sales team at 866-324-4005 or learn more here.

Zillow (Sml) Visitors by City - May '09

My three business passions are real estate, travel, and entertainment. Fortunately for me, I've been able to work in two out of those three fields so far in my career. The Entertainment industry will have to wait. I keep a close eye on the changing nature of the TV and Film industries though, so I was interested to read this report today about DVR usage.

33% of households now have a DVR, up from 22% 15 months ago.

Some of the conclusions are counter-intuitive.

The key points are:

1) DVRs increase TV watching (I concur)

2) Not everyone skips commercials (surprising)

3) Viewership of commercials is often higher among DVR users (huh?!)

4) Recent DVR users are clueless and don't timeshift

One thing remains clear to me: whether or not DVR usage is as transformational to the TV industry as some think or thought, clearly it's helping to push advertising budgets onto the Internet, and for that I'm very grateful.

Entertainment -- DVR Risk -- 5-29-09

We all know that a question like this is irrelevant because all that matters is when local home prices (down to the neighborhood level) will turn around. However, the media can't help but ask this question, and I don't really blame them. My own perspective is that we're still about a year out from a national bottom in home prices (fall 2011) and then we're likely to see an L-shaped recovery (i.e., values will stay flat for at least 2 years before starting to turn up).

What are the experts saying? They're a little more optimistic than I am. Here's Reuters' survey of housing experts:

It was always a good idea to post your listing on Zillow for free. But with the runaway success of the new Zillow iPhone App -- over 300,000 downloads in the first two weeks -- there's yet another reason to do so.