Zillow’s Moves Do Make Sense

Zillow recently announced that Right at Home Realty, Canada’s largest independent real estate brokerage, will send a direct listing feed to Zillow.com.

zillowFor-sale listings from Right at Home Realty as well as other Canadian listings will be featured on Zillow.com soon.

Zillow has relationships in the U.S. with thousands of brokerages and real estate agents and hundreds of MLSs and is expanding these efforts into Canada, offering partners a simple and free way to drive global exposure to Canadian homes for sale. Zillow also receives more than 100 million visits from non-U.S. audiences a year, with the largest shares from Canada, U.K., India, Germany, Mexico and Chinai.

Zillow is proud to partner with Right at Home Realty and offer this widely respected Canadian brand free advertising for their listings on one of the most visited real estate sites in the world. Zillow has proven to be a highly effective marketing tool for real estate professionals in the U.S., and we’re excited to expand our relationships into Canada, increasing exposure to Canadian homes for sale, while offering buyers a more robust home search experience for North America.

Errol Samuelson, Zillow Group Chief Industry Development Officer.

“Zillow also recently announced that it will begin offering to buy homes in Atlanta and, later this fall, open the same service in Denver,” says REAL Trends President Steve Murray. “It also announced that the only surprise here is that obviously, Zillow is ignoring those investors and pundits who questioned why this was related to their core mission and moving to grow this business.  With this program, Zillow can generate thousands of potential prospects for its premier agents, increase its revenue from doing so and increase its value.”

As REAL Trends has learned from a recent team financial study done in partnership with the California Association of REALTORS, the value of a good prospect is nearly 50 percent of the total value of a brokerage transaction. So, Zillow’s move to find new ways to generate prospects (or leads) for its premier agents makes a great deal of sense.
 

What Is Zillow Offers Anyway?

 

 

How Zillow puts it, Zillow Offers allows for sellers to ‘Skip the hassle. Sell to Zillow.’

And from there it’s pretty self explanatory. Homeowners in eligible markets, for now that means Phoenix, Atlanta and Las Vegas, can request for Zillow to review their home, community and market and if all goes well, Zillow will present a cash offer. From there, the seller can refuse or accept the offer. If accepted that’s when the process is taken from online to offline.