Over the past several months Zillow has gone on a country wide hiring spree, spending some of their $87MM VC cache/cash. The WSJ compared Zillow's use of a new form of interview with speed dating.
I don't know if any Realtors were recruited, interviewed or hired, but these new employees were recruited for Zillow's new national sales force and their Home Direct Ads Program, selling pinpoint-targeted online ads to regional, national and international companies, wanting to target their ads by location or any specific Real Estate demographic.
How did Woolworth amass one of the world's great fortunes by selling things for 5 and 10 cents?
How can Google make money by selling keyword-relevant search ads for less than a dollar?
Can Zillow make money by selling Google-Like Ads on its 83 million pages?
In talking to Realtors about Zillow, most have a basic misunderstanding of how different Zillow is from agents, brokers and directly selling houses. Zillow is much more like their newspaper, their Google and/or their favorite media company.
When the money on the Internet was in being a subscription-model portal, everyone wanted to be "The Next AOL." If all the money in Real Estate is in home selling, every company should want to be "The Next Realogy". But if you believe in the network-media business model of Free Content > Drive Traffic > Sell Ads, then the rich future lies in being "The Google of Real Estate."
Not that Google isn't trying to crack Real Estate itself with Google Base, but the other battles fighting for supremacy in Video Search, Blog Search and Social Media, even Google made be spread too thin to address Real Estate, as Zillow is doing. It's Zillow's only game, unless you still believe Zillow wants to broker houses as well as ads.
Zillow's new Home Direct Ads Program uses their new sales force to sell ads to regional and national companies wanting to target the demographics of location, down to the individual home; and feature, down to the specific demographic.
One of Zillow's first campaigns was for Sony, who wanted to target their ads for Vaio Laptops to homes selling for $1 Million or more. Zillow can do that, now. Zillow can do that, wow!
But how does Zillow know when a home is for sale?:
- Zillow has just signed up ERA and the RE/MAX Brokerages in VA, MD and DC to bulk load their listings to Zillow.
- Zillow has almost 1 million home owners who have "claimed" their home's page, and Zillow knows when these owners list.
- Zillow crunches the numbers. Fifty percent of Zillow's visitor traffic comes between the time a home is listed for sale and the purchase offer is signed.
Three strikes and you're in.
But most verticals have the same basic problem: the reason you're there is not to click ads.
It would be unusual for Zillow to be effective selling Google-Like ads on its vertical Real Estate site. Other verticals, like Social Networking site, FaceBook, and the Video Search site,YouTube, have such poor click-through-rates (CTRs), that they've had to add different types of ads like: Banner, Display/Graphic, sponsorship, product placement, and text integrated ads to try to realize their traffic monetizing predictions.
As long as Zillow sticks to giving Realtors free exposure, trying to sell us ads and not stealing our commissions or eating our lunch; we should focus our energies money and concerns on our true Buggy Men: the DOJ, the FTC, the FSBOs and the Discount Brokers.
Posted by: Cliff Jacobson
Adapt Or Die! Happy Searching.
WebHomeUSAblog; The Blog of Real Estate Search Marketing
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