Zillow Buys Trulia for $3.5 Billion in Stock
The purchase should close in 2015. It still does have to pass the U.S. Antitrust waiting periods.
Trulia's CEO Pete Flint will be reporting to Zillow's CEO Spencer Rascoff.
Then Spencer Rascoff goes on to say:
“Consumers love using Zillow and Trulia to find vital information about homes and connect with the best local real estate professionals,” Rascoff said. “Both companies have been enormously successful in creating compelling consumer brands and deep industry partnerships, but it’s still early days in the world of real estate advertising on mobile and Web. This is a tremendous opportunity to combine our resources and achieve even more impressive innovation that will benefit consumers and the real estate industry.”
I don't know which consumers he is talking about. I know that consumers on the west coast like Zillow but here in South Florida we hear so many complaints about Zillow. Most consumers are so happy when we give them our website to use instead.
I also argue that Zillow is taking the fact that consumers click their PPC ads and saying that means that consumers like Zillow.
Also, since the Panda update by Google, Zillow shows up at the top of the organic search for almost all real estate terms and the top space on page one of Google gets about 48% of the clicks.
So are they mixing up their traffic data with actual "liking" their site?
Their inaccuries are frustrating to real estate agents AND to consumers.
Zillow makes most of its money from real estate agents. Real estate agents fork over their money to the tune of $311 Million dollars so far this year alone to Zillow.
Can you imagine how much SEO power the agents would have if they had invested that amount of money into their blogging for the business and for getting their own leads?
Here is a great article by Brad Inman in Inman news about the Zillow's ultimate goals,
http://www.inman.com/2014/07/25/zillows-trulia-move-is-checkmate/
I wrote a post about Zillow buying Trulia as soon as I read it at Bloomberg, click here.
I have read a lot in the forums and in email trails from many of my clients, colleagues and industry leaders. Everyone has their opinion of course.
I have always been a firm believer in always having a plan B, just in case.
Remember that Zillow's success is at this point totally predicated on real estate agents' being willing to fork over tons of money to be premier agents on their sites. If at any point, that money flow turned off, Zillow would not be able to recover.
Zillow has not been profitable either. The stockholders will be demanding changes in order to get profits because now Zillow must obey Wall Street and Wall Street will demand EBITDA to justify the pricing, etc. Zillow will have to raise a lot more money than the revenues of ALL the residential real estate brokerages in the market.
Remember that this may be a knife that cuts both ways. But Rascoff is not stupid and I am sure he has plans up his sleeve.
What is the positive side to all of this? If this does not light a fire under your behind to get your blogging for business going, I don't know if anything ever will. This is the time to start going after your longtail keywords that Zillow can not reach. You know your market.
Get on page one for your terms that people in your neighborhoods are searching for that Zillow is not ranking for.
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