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Featured Listings on Zillow - Major Change To The Site Starting Today

Reblogger Russell Haskins
Services for Real Estate Pros with Homes & Land

Zillow is a web partner of Homes & Land. Therefore, this change will not affect you as an advertiser. Best of all, this new fee doesn't apply to Homes & Land advertisers because we supply them with a feed of all Homes & Land listings! :)

Original content by Sara Bonert

There are two big product changes on Zillow today.  The first is the addition of Rentals to the site, which I blogged about here.  We are very excited to now have this functionality available to both Agents and home shoppers. 

The second change has to do with listings that are manually added to the site, or don't come to Zillow via an automated feed.  If you are one of the few who do this, please pay close attention to this post. 

Starting today, in order to post a home for sale on Zillow, you can either buy a Featured Listing for $9.95 for 180 days, or if you have 50 or more listings, you can send us a listings feed, for free.  Featured Listings are sorted to the top of search results for a particular geography, and receive 6 times more views than non-featured listings --  ensuring that those who are paying us receive extra exposure and extra potential for success on the site.  As with all Zillow listings, the agent can still add unlimited photos and a detailed property description. 

A big reason we made this change was improve the quality of For Sale listings on Zillow.  Specifically, we found that listings manually added to Zillow have a higher occurrence of outdated information, which can lead to a misleading experience for consumers.  We believe this change will eradicate much of this outdated information, as there is greater incentive for a paying advertiser to maintain accurate and updated information on their listings. 

Currently, only 3% of Zillow's 3.6 million For Sale listings are manually posted (1% are FSBO, and 2% are FSBA) so this change impacts only a very small number of listings. The remaining 97% of our listings come to the site from listings feeds, which will continue to be free.

So as a recap, all manual listings on Zillow are now Featured Listings.  It costs $9.95 for 180 days (basically 6 cents a day) and includes:

  • Featured placement at the top of the search results, generating 6xs more views than a basic listing
  • "Featured" designation in the search results and on the listing page
  • Ability to upload unlimited photos
  • A detailed property description
  • All contacts will come directly to you 

And of course, any Agent who currently sends Zillow listing via a feed also has the option to upgrade to a Featured Listing for this low price!

Post a Featured Listing here.

Zillow Featured Listings and Rental Listings

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Sara Bonert
Zillow - Atlanta, GA
Real Estate Internet Marketing

Hey Russell - You got it!  Actually about 97% of the listings on the site come to us via feed.  So this really only affected the 3% that manually upload.  Thanks for being a great listing partner!

Dec 16, 2009 12:58 AM
Lee & Pamela St. Peter
Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices YSU Realty: (919) 645-2522 - Raleigh, NC
Making Connections to Success in Real Estate

and for helping clarify Zillow's new FEE structure. 

Dec 17, 2009 02:06 AM