On October 30, Zillow took even more scare out of Realtor's Halloween by taking another step toward selling targeted ads, not selling houses, with its Home Direct Ads Program. "Trick or Treat", Anyone?
Since Zillow was a gleam in Richard Barton's eye, Realtors, and many commentators, haven't bought his argument that Zillow was only interested in selling ads. In Real Estate you have to sell houses to make money, right?
Why just be the next Realogy of Real Estate, when you can be the first Google of Real Estate? (Look at Realogy and Google's recent stock performances. You be the judge.) The only broker Zillow's becoming, is an ad broker.
Would Venture Capitalists (VCs) be interested, to the tune of $87 MM, in a start-up Real Estate Broker, that's never sold a house? I thought Warren Buffett's was the only mogul buying up Real Estate firms (and letting them keep their names).
Zillow's patent-pending Home Direct Ads Program allows advertisers to connect with Zillow's 70 MM (of 83 MM) home owners by any Zillow demographic, down to the individual home.
Zillow can identify houses for sale by the listings of owners and Brokers, and also by the traffic or site-visitation patterns on the specific home's page. A spike in home views indicates the home is for sale. When many home owners are about to list, they check their home's valuation on Zillow.
After the listing, an average of 15 buyers make trips to the address on Zillow (half of all Zillow's traffic)to check out the valuation. Wallah, a market list of all the homes for sale, with the demographics advertisers drool for.
Zillow now can identify these homes for sale and sell ads on these sites by location, down to the street address, price, a great indicator of family income, and/or by any other demographic Zillow tracks.
Two months ago Sony began buying targeted ads for their Vaio laptop computers on homes selling for over $1 MM. For advertisers the most important "Location, Location, Location" is on "Zillow, Zillow, Zillow."
When a home owner uses Zillow's remodeler wizard, Zillow can also track this behavior and sell ads on the home's site to companies interested in reaching the home remodeler.
Zillow already has EZ Ads, a self-service ad sales vehicle, for local companies, including Realtors, to put display ads on homes in specific Zip Codes.
Zillow the House Broker is dead. Long live Zillow the Ad Platform.
Posted by: Cliff Jacobson
Adapt Or Die! Happy Searching.
WebHomeUSAblog; The Blog of Real Estate Search Marketing
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