zillow.com: Don’t Tell Us It’s For Sale

Spencer Rascoff, COO for US property valuation site and portal zillow.com, posted a blog last week stating that zillow.com was withdrawing its contentious “tell us it’s for sale” function from its website.


“Some brokers who didn’t like the feature argued that it allowed someone other than the listing agent to ‘advertise’ the listing, which is a no-no”, Rascoff writes. “Our position was always that it is a conversation piece about that home, the type of thing that someone in the community would say to someone else – ‘hey did you see that the house down the street is for sale for $500,000?’.”

Nevertheless, zillow.com have decided to pull the plug on this feature and it doesn’t appear many will miss it. Rascoff says only 4,323 listings on the entire zillow.com website were reported for sale by someone other than the listing agent or owner – which is less than 0.1% of their listings.

“Rather than continue to apologise for and explain away this issue to important partners, we’re listening and we’re yanking it.”

zillow.com says that the move to eliminate this function from the website has parallels to its recent decision to drop real estate brokerage licenses. It consolidates further zillow.com’s expertise as a listings website, working with realtors rather than competing with them.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to David Gibbons at zillow.com for clarifying our initial report on this news. Our original report suggested zillow.com had removed private sellers from the website. In fact, private sellers can and do list homes for sale on zillow.com. David writes:

“The feature that we’ve removed was something different. Agents used to be able to flag homes that are on the market but not yet posted it on Zillow. It was kind of like a buyers’ agent telling their buyers what was available … just on Zillow. It’s a pity that this feature was misunderstood but it doesn’t matter that much … the listing agent is the best source of a listing’s info and our time is better spent building features to make Zillow work better for them.”

1. Almost 1 Million Have zillow.com App

   zillow.com's iPhone application has been downloaded 945,000 times since its launch in April 2009, and a number of new features have just been added. To begin with, home hunters with the US real estate marketplace's app can now share home data, zestimate values and photos via Facebook and Twitter....

2. zillow.com Now Lists Rentals

   There has been a big change at zillow.com over the past 24 hours: the addition of rental listings. In its press release, zillow.com says featured rental listings on its US real estate marketplace will cost US$9.95 for 180 days. However, in highlighting the first ten rental properties listed just a few hours after the option was launched, zillow.com said: “Cost is just $9.95 per listing for 180 days on the second-largest real estate website in the US.”...

3. zillow.com Turns Four

   Yesterday marked the fourth birthday of zillow.com, the real estate marketplace that now says it has data on 96,013,458 US homes and sees over 8 million unique visitors per month. The past year has been big at zillow.com. The website recently reported a 57 percent increase in unique visitors over 2008 totals. In fact, chief operating officer Spencer Rascoff was so optimistic about zillow.com's audience figures he told businessinsider.com that the website was "closing fast" on realtor.com, and that he hopes to be able to confirm zillow.com's place at the top of the US market “within short order”. ...

4. zillow.com Now Charging for Lender Leads

   zillow.com, the US based real estate marketplace, has changed the pricing model in its mortgage marketplace, introducing “market-based pricing” for customer-initiated contacts. ...

5. IPO Talk at zillow.com

   zillow.com chief operating officer Spencer Rascoff has revealed hopes for an initial public offering in 2011. “We’re not a 2010 IPO candidate, but hopefully we’re a 2011 IPO candidate,” Rascoff told Bloomberg in a recent interview. ...