Zillow will be charging for all manual listing uploads to their site. This, as they also add rental properties to their site as well.
Adding a property for sale (or rent) on Zillow either as a homeowner or agent will now set you back $9.95 for a 6-month listing. Volume discounts are also available for individuals wanting to list 50 properties or more and can provide a data feed. Using a syndication tool like vFlyer or Postlets however, will still let you upload your listings for free.
Zillow has made steady gains in market-share since its launch. And in the early days it was all about building out its database. But clearly now, Zillow feels like it has hit its stride with the acquisition of new listings and either a) no longer needs the manual uploads or b) feels the heat and needs to start to monetizing that inventory.
The shift to a pay-to-play model does run somewhat counter to the good corporate citizen image the company has publicly tried to espouse with agents. Zillow may know this as well. The soft rollout and the hedge with the syndicators.
Nevertheless, Zillow's representatives claim only 3% of their 4 million listed homes are manually uploaded - the remainder come from bulk upload feeds from third-party syndicators, brokers and MLSs - so at 10 bucks a pop, that's a tidy $1.2M in quarterly revenue the company now hopes to pocket. Not huge dollars, but in this day and age... every dollar counts.
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