Imagine it's Monday morning and you're in your local coffee shop picking up your morning espresso.  You're trying to decide on the grande or the venti when you happen to overhear the two women in front of you discussing an open house that one of them visited this past weekend.  She's excited about the home, but has some questions about the neighborhood and the commute to her office.  It so happens that you've also seen the home and that you specialize in the neighborhood they're discussing.  You politely introduce yourself, and spend the next ten minutes sipping your drink and answering the woman's questions.  Two days later, you receive a call from the woman and you have a new client.

Now imagine having that same experience online- where someone asks a question and you answer and you get credit for answering.  This is exactly what Zillow's new Home Q & A feature is all about.  It's a free service on Zillow where anyone can ask any question on any home (even the ones not for sale) and anyone can answer any question about any home.  Some of the most interesting answers to important questions about homes are locked up inside the heads of homeowners, agents, neighbors, and previous owners.  It is our hope that if a question is asked about a home, the community will rise up to answer it.  Any answers that you might give will tie back to your free profile on Zillow.  From your profile, customers can choose to call you, email you, or link off to your website- all for free.  Just imagine for a minute the prospecting opportunities this creates for enterprising agents.

Let's use a real-world example.  Let's say you're an agent who specializes in the Madison Park area of Seattle (a nice, upscale neighborhood).  Now imagine for a minute that a customer comes to Zillow, and leaves a question on a home they saw for sale in Madison Park.  With Zillow's Home Q & A you can jump in and answer that question for the customer.  And anyone who visits that home on Zillow will also see your answer.  When you do leave an aswer, we'll put a link from your answer back to your FREE profile.  From your profile, a potential client can learn more about your professional experience, see a history of the answers you've given on Zillow, check out your current listings (you've uploaded all your listings to Zillow, right?  It's free, and more than 20k agents have done it so far!), email you, link to your website, or even call you.  All those free contacts from potential clients are our way of saying "thank you" for providing great content to the customers visiting Zillow.  If you want to see a great looking profile, just click here. 

Another new feature launching today is called, "Tell Us It's For Sale".  This allows anyone in the Zillow community to let the rest of the community know that a home is for sale and it's asking price.  Here's how this might work for you:

Let's say you drive past a house in a neighborhood you know and see a "For Sale" sign on the front lawn.  You stop, pick up the flyer and give the house a careful look, mentally filing away a number of details for your potential buyers.  When you arrive back at your office you log onto Zillow to check some facts on the property and to check how the Zestimate compares to the $515,000 asking price.  When you find the house on Zillow, you see that it hasn't been listed as for sale.  You click on the "Tell Us It's for Sale" link on the page and enter the price.  Just like that, the home now appears as for sale on Zillow, and you receive credit as the person who reported it for sale by getting a link back to your free profile.  You can see a sample home with a link in the right hand column of the page to the person who reported it for sale here.

We built a massive database of Zestimate values to help consumers answer one question they face when thinking of buying or selling a home, but we've known all along that we could not possibly answer all of the important questions that owners, home buyers and sellers have about homes, neighborhoods, and the real estate market.  So, we've opened up Zillow's database of homes so that our large community of users could provide answers and better information.   We're especially excited about creating a way for agents to showcase their expertise to the Zillow community, all with the thought that it will lead to more business for you and a more vibrant experience for the Zillow community.

Additionally, today marks the launch of self-service Zillow EZ Ads, a low-cost and geographically targeted way for agents, other professionals and home sellers to advertise by specific ZIP code searches.  An ad takes a few minutes to create, can easily be bought with a credit card and costs just a penny per ad view.  EZ Ads can link to profile pages, homes for sale on Zillow, or external Web sites.  If you've ever thought about advertising on Zillow, here's a low cost way to test your ad in your own farm areas.  We think you'll find it more effective and affordable than many other types of advertising, including postcard mailers and newspaper ads. 

We hope you enjoy the new features and find them a free and valuable way to connect with potential clients.  Thanks in advance to sharing your knowledge and expertise with the rest of Zillow's community- we know it will takw time to build up the information on Zillow, but we're excited to be working with you to do it.