Bronte Media

UDPATE 9/14: Patrick from OnBoard just let me know that Reply isn’t using their Home Valuation tool but rather have another. Sorry about that.

While news of Reply.com’s relaunch went largely under the radar and was executed in a less than stellar manner (i.e. site crashed and was half-baked at launch), no one really focused on what the site has essentially become: a replica of zillow.

Reply.com is one of the smarter and savviest lead generation firms around, primarily around auto and real estate but with a little mortgage thrown in too.

Being a lead generation firm, you can put the forms and point the huge media buys toward them in a relatively unnoticed corner of the site and use the public site as another mechanism into the same forms.

The relaunch is essentially a branded version of OnBoard’s Home Valuation tool involves a custom home valuation tool they have built themselves or one other than OnBoard’s Home Valuation Estimator. OnBoard, which is a back end data provider to large real estate sites like Coldwell Banker and small sites that will be big ones like Homethinking :), is providing neighborhood and community info.

I expect the larger brokerages will follow suit, and soon consumers will be used to the Zillow-like interface of home valuation, even if increasingly they aren’t on Zillow nor even having Zillow crunch the numbers for the end result.

The valuations are fairly similar. Here is Zillow on a home in San Francisco on 16th Street. Here is Reply.com/Onboard.

Does that mean Zillow will be screwed? Not at all. If the search world told us anything a better user experience wins out with exactly the same data/technology. Yahoo was running Google’s search index for years. AOL still does. They both continue to lose market share. But competition will intensify.