Sellsius real estate marketing blog

I guess they're realizing that real estate isn't as easy as it looks.

Even if advertising is their business they'll have a hard time with real estate professionals of all stripes (Realtors, lenders, stagers, etc.) tightening their belts and watching all their marketing dollars in a challenging market.

I guess it's kinda like when the banks wanted to take over real estate. They could just taste the "easy money". Now they've bollixed up the mortgage end of things so badly they can't get far enough away from real estate.

I can't believe it took Zillow this long to figure out that "buying" consumer eyeballs with highly inflated "Zestimates" and they like would be any more successful than a rookie Realtor "buying" a listing by telling the Seller their house is worth whatever they fantasize it might be worth.

So true, Ken. Barton, in his Zillow profile, admits he only has a couple of years experience in real estate http://www.zillow.com/profile/Rich-Barton I think his inexperience is starting to show.

The zestimates were (are) a one trick pony with a bad leg. HomeGain tried home val before Z and realized it was not a money maker.

If you want to please real estate pros, your site has to bring traffic & help sell homes. Z should have made a concerted effort to get ROI data out there-- perhaps the ROI data was not worth advertising. Had they the ROI, agents would have evangelized the site. Had they pleased homeowners, they would evangelize the site. Advertisers are not evangelists. That's just the way I see it.

They had a chance (and still do) to be really remarkable by partnering with HOMEOWNERS. Heck, they had every home on the site (the one remarkable thing Z did) If they had homeowners, they'd get realtors and then get advertisers. In fact, I think they showed a distrust of homeowners by not allowing them the right to opt-out of zestimates.

I have never been a fan of Zillow and in most ways found them to be a competitor of mine - especially when it came to space on the Internet. As mentioned above, they brought little value to the Real Estate equation, and now with things being more difficult, they simply don't have a benefit that is truly marketable.

At least in the Phoenix market area I have not found the Zillow estimates of home value to be very accurate at all. I am not suprised that they are starting to have touble with their business model.