Posts Tagged ‘zillow’

Real estate listing site Zillow.com just announced a collaboration with Howard Hanna Real Estate Services that automatically feeds all 21,000 Howard Hanna for-sale listings to Zillow.com. Areas covered are Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and New York.

“We continually seek out ways to innovate and maximize marketing exposure for our associates and listings,” Howard W. “Hoddy” Hanna III, the company’s chair and CEO, said, in the announcement. “By distributing our listings to Zillow, we are able to expose our clients to Zillow’s audience of more than 10 million unique visitors(ii) each month. This offers a tremendous marketing opportunity for our 4,700 sales associates and their sellers.”

The Zillow Listings Feed Program now has more than 800 real estate professionals advertising over four million for-sale listings. Its new rental listing service now includes more than 65,000 rental listings including those of collaborator ForRent.com.

The February Zillow Real Estate Market Reports was just announced on the Zillow Blog. Much of the U.S. is still experiencing home value depreciation, with the national Home Value Index down .5 percent month over month and 5.4 percent year over year. 

The rate of monthly decline has improved from January’s .8 percent decline, however.

Of the studied 25 U.S. markets two remained flat – Los Angeles and San Francisco; two improved – Las Vegas and Philadelphia; and the rest declined.  A near-record one in 1000 homes were foreclosed on in February, and 22.35 percent of all home-sale transactions involved foreclosed properties.

Zillow predicts that home valuations will bottom out in June 2010.

Real estate Web site Zillow.com just announced that its Zillow on iPad App is available on the App Store.  Here users can see details, historical data and photos of homes for sale or rent,  find home values via Zestimate, and search a database of 95 million properties, all while on the go.

“We jumped at the chance to create the Zillow on IPad App because we saw this as a unique opportunity to create a brand new, photo-driven home shopping experience on the most incredible Apple device yet,” said Rich Barton, Zillow chair and CEO, in the announcement. “Our app for IPad has the potential to radically change the way people search and comparison shop for real estate and we’re excited to be on the App Store for iPad from day one.”

The IPad app, beyond being mobile provides a large touch-screen, with a map in either landscape or portrait mode. Its brand new IPad-specific shopping interface allows side by side viewing of multiple homes, and a drag and drop of favorite homes. Shoppers can filter by price, size or type, and share via e-mail or Facebook.

The Zillow IPad app is available free from the App Store. 

Time.com offers some excellent coverage of the IPad itself, complete with photos.

Zillow.com just announced that the fourth largest brokerage in the U.S., Seattle-based John L. Scott Real Estate, will now automatically feed its 15,000 real estate listings to the Zillow site.  The Northwest real estate firm of 3600 sales associates joins more then 800 other real estate companies in the Zillow listing feed program.

“Zillow is very pleased to partner with John L.Scott, one of the most productive regional real estate companies in the nation, and a highly regarded brokerage with deep roots in the Seattle real estate community,” said Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s COO, in the announcement.

Each John L. Scott listing on Zillow will include property description, photos and contact for the listing agent. Additionally, all listings will appear on the Zillow IPhone application. 

8.7 million unique users visited Zillow in February 2010, according to Omniture. 

Real estate advertisers, and publishers who help advertisers succeed, would do well to listen to what Zillow has learned about real estate listings that do and don’t work.

Just published on the Zillow blog, the key observation of the 50 most successful recent Zillow ads was that a real estate listing gets far more response than an ad with an agent head shot. 45 of the top 50 ads had a photo of the exterior of the home, while three others had interior shots. Two displayed aerial photos. All photos were taken on a sunny day. 42 of the ads were specific about the location, either by naming the city, the neighborhood or the actual address.

For the entire list of listing tactics that sell, as well as the “how-not-to-place-a-listing” tips, visit the Zillow blog.

The following Hitwise list shows Web sites for the industry ‘Business and Finance – Real Estate’, ranked by visits for the week ending 08/08/2009.

1. Realtor.com
2. Yahoo! Real Estate
3. Zillow
4. ZipRealty
5. Rent.com
6. Trulia.com
7. ServiceMagic
8. Apartments.com
9. Homes.com
10. RE/MAX Real Estate
11. Homegain
12. US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
13. AOL Real Estate
14. Apartment Guide
15. MyNewPlace
16. Century 21 Real Estate
17. RealtyTrac
18. ForRent.com
19. Redfin
20. LoopNet
 

Zillow has just released its Q2 Real Estate Market Report, concluding that while June U.S. home sales were up 3.8 percent over May numbers, they were 23.7 percent lower than in June 2008. Home values fell for the tenth consecutive quarter, now down more than 12 percent from Q208. Foreclosure sales were 22 percent of June’s U.S. home sales. In its study of 165 markets, Zillow found a slight increase in home sales in some of the hardest-hit real estate markets such as Phoenix and Los Angeles.

We’ve talked about real estate site Zillow quite a bit. Click here and here for the latest.

Zillow has upgraded its Showcase Ads to “expand” when you roll your mouse over them. It’s a standard display ad trick, but it’s new to Zillow. Expanding the add shows more content and can include a contact form for the Realtor. Clicking on the ad takes the visitor to the Realtor’s Web site. There’s no extra cost for the new ad format.

The Sellius blog is less than enamored with the expandable ad units. They cover up existing listings on the page, blogger Joseph Ferrara notes. He’d rather the ads appear over non-listings content.

Trulia also uses expandable ads.

Move.com and its daughter Web site Realtor.com have long held the top positions for the most traffic in the U.S. online property space. But faster and nimbler competitors have been steadily nipping at its heels, and now the company’s new president and CEO has acknowledged that, given the impact on the real estate industry of the worldwide recession, Move Inc. has no choice but to reinvent itself or risk becoming irrelevant.

That’s tough talk from the new head of the company who’s only been on the job for a few months now. But Steven Berkowitz, who took the helm in January, is not one to shy away from challenges. Berkowitz has held leadership roles at Ask.com, where as CEO he eased the company into profitability, and as president of IDG Books where he helped establish the “For Dummies” series.

Move’s traditional business – listings and lead generation – is under siege. The future, Berkowitz explained in a conference call with financial analysts, must be more hyper-local, more social and include significant homeowner-generated content. If that sounds like Berkowitz is learning the lessons of Facebook, you’d be right.

Berkowitz isn’t going as far as building an entirely new brand, he said, but the changes will involve shifting the focus of the company from “an organization built around individual products to one centered around common business functions” along with better integrating technology and operations around “everything related to the life cycle of home ownership.”

To say that the real estate market is hurting is, of course, by now an understatement. Move has already cut $20 million in costs, according to company CFO Lewis Belote.

First-quarter revenues were down nearly 11 percent, or $54 million, compared with the same quarter of 2008. New Homes and Media took the biggest hit, dropping 47 and 30 percent respectively. Compared to Q408, revenue was down 4.5 percent.

Berkowitz started the conference call by saying that, despite the challenges ahead, he was “more excited today than when I first accepted the job.”

The company has a great base to build on, he added. “In March we led the market with 7 million unique users and 196 million … our minutes of engagement in March were more than the combined minutes of Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Tulia, and Rent.com combined.”

Nevertheless, “our technology platform is relatively fragmented as we have bolted on new technologies from acquisitions and new initiatives,” and assets haven’t been integrated “the way they should be,” he said, citing as an example the need to create better synergies between Move’s back-end Realtor tool, Top Producer, and the Realtor.com consumer-facing Web platform.

Technology considerations aside, the real issue is that people are just not moving from home to home the way they used to. And “for someone who’s not planning on moving soon, they also care about their property values, taxes, relative news and content, and everything else that impacts their home and their community,” Berkowitz said.

Or put another way, if “we can bring information to consumers before they’re in the market to buy a home … I think that our ability to stay connected with them throughout the lifelong process gives us a much better chance to get more important to that part of the value chain,” Berkowitz said. And that means “not just listings available for sale.”

As we see it, that’s a pretty big deal for a company that’s built its empire on an exclusive listing relationship with the National Association of Realtors.
Move “needs to be the company to serve all of these consumer needs,” Berkowitz emphasized. And that involves more than just searching for home values which Berkowitz described as “more of a singular occurrence” and just “a piece of the puzzle.”

Partnerships with third parties are an important part of branding Move as the go-to place for all one’s real estate requirements. Berkowitz acknowledged that “in terms of our ability to do partnerships in our own industry, I don’t think we’ve executed extremely well.”

Structurally, Berkowitz envisions creating new leadership positions that will operate across all of the company’s divisions. He cited the roles of chief product, chief technology and chief revenue officer. Aral Samuelson, the current president of Realtor.com, will double in the job as chief revenue officer. Move is still recruiting for the other two positions.

Zillow has introduced three new widgets that put Zillow data on any Web site or blog by adding a small amount of code. The new widgets show most expensive homes, newest for sale homes, and recently sold homes. Clicking on a displayed home opens the Zillow page with that home’s listing.

A number of sites are already using the widgets including Wallyhood.org – a local blog focused on the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle – and Evergreen Park Realty, a Point2 site.

Two companies providing online real estate listings have won WebWare’s 2009 “WebWare 100” prize: ZipRealty and Zillow. For the latter, WebWare cited Zillow’s ability for visitors to ask questions of sellers or agents without having to register. 

ZipRealty is a full-service, residential brokerage operating in 36 U.S. markets.

In the location-based services category, Yelp won a spot. Craigslist kept its place in the “commerce” category.

Not surprisingly, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter all claimed spots in the social and publishing category.

Not making the cut – Trulia in real estate, and recruitment portals JobCoin, JibberJobber, and JobScore, all of which were nominated (see our story here).

The full list is here.

Trulia and HotPads have received Webby awards in the real estate category. Trulia was chosen by the judges as the Webby Award Winner while HotPads was the People’s Choice Winner. They bested fellow nominees Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, NYTimes.com/realestate and Riverfront Park. We first reported on the Webbies here.

Last year Zillow was the Webby Award Winner, and Trulia was voted People’s Voice Winner.

The formal awards ceremony will be held on June 9, 2009.

We knew Zillow’s new iPhone app, released a week ago, would be popular. But its success exceeded even our expectations. The company’s blog reported that Zillow’s mobile app had 15,666 downloads in the first 24 hours, making it the number one real estate app in the Apple App Store. It’s closing in on the same rank for the lifestyle category overall.

In a separate report, the TechFlash blog says that Zillow’s staff numbers are returning to pre-lay off levels. In October last year, the company laid off 40 staff members. The site is now back up to 140, according to the report which is just below the number working for the Web site before October 2008.

Zillow has released a free iPhone application that will allow users to access property values and other real estate information (such as photos and agent contact) on the go. The app goes even further and allows users to locate open houses via GPS and to pop up price information as a user passes by a property. Homes for sale can be plotted out on a map. Zillow’s iPhone app grabs data both from the company’s Zestimates and Make Me Move sections.

Initial reviews have been mixed. SFGate.com, for example, called the application “buggy, incomplete and occasionally maddeningly slow,” but also admits that it is “easy to use and quickly draws out your inner voyeur.” Zillow can call up details on 3.3 million for-sale listings plus 95 percent of all U.S. homes, not just those on the market.

Zillow isn’t the first to offer such functionality, of course. Trulia did the same last year (an updated version came out in February) and has already had 170,000 downloads.

The Zillow iPhone app is an improvement over simply accessing Zillow via the Web browser. On a Blackberry for example, the map doesn’t appear.

For Realtors, the iPhone app is good news. Users can call or send an e-mail to an agent with one click.

Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff was enthusiastic about his company’s new product. “To be honest, I think the iPhone app…might be better than our Web site” he told Inman News. For example, iPhone users can pinch to “pan and zoom” images on the iPhone. On the computer, this would require mousing and scrolling.