She told me; “they are moving to an all team concept”. She wasn’t a Zillow employee, rather a Zillow power buyer describing her vision of their future. I had no reason to doubt her as she had just participated in a company sponsored panel with other power buyers staged for a crowd of lesser zip code toe-danglers. I believe everyone’s intention was to illustrate a future direction.
I don’t think anyone actually says, one man’s hell is another man’s heaven, then again not many attend Zillow Premier Agent events. The Zillow team concept looks a lot like a millennial interpretation of Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross”. The selling point being, if you are the agent making the Zillow commitment, you get the Alec Baldwin role (heaven). The pitch, like trading time-shares, seems simple enough: an agent steps up, commits to large Zillow lead volumes and then hires ISR’s (Inside Sales Representatives) to; “pound the phones all day” (hell). At least the modern-day version of the boiler room is virtual.
It is truly hard to believe that Zillow has already celebrated its 10th year. Those around before that time will remember what a pain in the ass realtor.com was to deal with. At the time, they were the only game in town and they acted like it. Then along came Zillow and others offering a breath of fresh air and attitude. They gave end users exactly what they wanted. Consumers loved Zillow because they weren’t sold to or hassled with in any way. Then as today, Zillow users get a great real estate voyeurism app.
Any agent who has ever dealt with Zillow knows all too well how aggressive their sales staff is in pushing zip codes. This is the face of Zillow the consumer has never seen. With the introduction of their new “concierge service”, Zillow is now touching the consumer. It remains to be seen how the aggressive call back feature of the Concierge Service, a comfort to those who are paying for it, will sit with the consumer. It does make one wonder about “tone”. Because once the consumer has traversed the Concierge layer of phone calls they are then handed over to the sales agent boiler room. Remember, ABC, always be closing!
Now that Zillow touches the consumer, they get to own the consumer’s experience. Have a bad one and the consumer will blame Zillow, not the Inside Sales Rep. And, Zillow does not appear to be doing much for themselves in terms of accountability, which can’t help going forward.
Within the span of 90 minutes in a corporate presentation, Zillow hammered home the importance of agents getting “reviews” as a primary differentiator against competition. Only to be told later, in the SAME presentation, to simply have friends write reviews for you. So if Zillow executives are telling audiences of agents to lie about their reviews, the practice is probably rampant. That can’t sit well with the power buyers who have played by the rules.
Success is hard to maintain. Too often companies turn into the type of company they had replaced.
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