Zillow’s new feature Zillow Advice is a real estate Q&A focused on getting local professionals to answer local questions. This is an attempt to offset a major gripe with TruliaVoices, where agents from Kalamazoo are answering questions asked by consumers in Kansas City (and banking stats on Trulia). Bad kitty.
Zillow Advice will also attempt to engage Zillow’s diverse Professional Directory. Whereas Trulia seems to be overflowing with a red ocean of clawing real estate agents, Zillow hopes to have other pros (lawyers, contractors, accountants, etc) put in their two cents. Search questions and answers by keyword, category or subcategory.
Here’s the skinny from Zillow’s Social Media guru, David Gibbons:
Advice pulls together the site’s social features including the Real Estate Guide, Home Q&A and Discussions and adds a new dimension to Zillow in the form of local Questions.
A professional’s participation in Advice is measured both quantitatively and geographically. Realtors that provide local advice earn a local reputation on Zillow. The Local Expert badge that was recently added to profiles is now informed of “where” RE pro’s offer advice and the algorithm also affords extra importance to valuable participation like providing the “best answer” to a local question. You may remember that this was the piece that was missing from our professional directory at launch – a good way for professionals to demonstrate local expertise (beyond listings.)
IMO, local questions and reputation are the primary innovation here but we’ve also put effort into making pro’s more productive. A professional can now subscribe to e-mail or RSS alerts to tease out relevant questions asked by buyers in their neighborhood. (emphasis added)
A screenshot of the “Ask a Question” dash: Type in your question (you can add a link or photo), pick a category and subcategory and enter your location. (Subscribe to the answers). Easy.
When I asked DavidG to compare Zillow Advice with TruliaVoices, he replied:
LOCAL reputation. We sort our RE pro directory by LOCAL expertise first so there is very little incentive on Zillow for a Realtor in Miami to answer a question asked by a buyer in Seattle (other than simply wanting to help, of course.) On Zillow, you have to answer Seattle questions to be a Seattle expert – you can’t just say you that work in Seattle and then answer whatever questions come your way. I don’t think Trulia has a professional directory yet – whereas Zillow’s implementation of Advice is deeply integrated with Zillow’s existing professional directory and profiles and geared towards helping buyers and sellers find the best LOCAL agent for them. Answering a question on Zillow not only makes you look smart to the person that asked BUT more importantly, improves your local ranking in the directory that all consumers are using to find a pro on our site.
Zillow is far stronger on mortgage advice. Zillow Mortgage Marketplace has attracted lender engagement at a level T-voices can’t match. Many of our lenders now earn 100% of their income from ZMM and so are heavily invested in the success of the site – these guys feel about ZMM the way that you guys feel about your blogs. As such, there’s really nowhere on the web that you can get the depth and immediacy of mortgage advice that you can get on Zillow.
Far fewer SPAM threads. This is subjective but in my experience, the Zillow moderators and regular users in Discussions have done a far better job of keeping self promotional threads started by pro’s out of the Zillow Discussion forums. In my opinion, that’s important to consumer adoption of these features. Zillow discussions have always been consumer-heavy and T-voices has been lacking for consumer engagement relative to the RE pro’s that use it. (emphasis added)
My take:
Pros:
- Zillow Advice may be more consumer friendly (and useful) by tapping into the expertise of professionals other than real estate agents. While agents undoubtedly know alot about their local markets, some questions are beyond their scope, such as legal, insurance, mortgage and title questions. Zillow’s Professional Directory provides a nice complement to this service and the community will hopefully not be overweighted with agents answering most of the questions, as on TruliaVoices. The strength of Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace could make it a destination site for mortgage questions.
- Consumers will get local experts answering local questions, since the system does not encourage out-of-towner answers to score brownie points. This is a big plus for consumers.
- Local experts will compete with other local experts in categories suited to their expertise. Local pros will not have to compete with cross-country yahoos for the consumer’s attention.
- More real estate content will make the site Googlicious.
Cons
- Is, and every shall be, The Zestimate. Disgruntled homeowners have already come out of the discussion forums to voice their complaints on Advice, clouding the early water. This will require either some form of moderation (dragging them back to the forums) or Barton flavored transparency, where all the dirty laundry will be allowed to waft freely in Advice for the good of us all.
- Drain on manpower for moderation. Between spam, self-promotion and other gaming trickery, some folks are going to be very busy. With the recent layoffs, this will strain the staff.
Overall, I give Zillow Advice a thumbs up and wish the Z crew good tidings.
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