Recap of the Zillow vs Trulia Conference Call

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.