Bronte Media

In my little corner of the world, some major news hit the wires last night: Zillow, which previous had just offered home valuation guides, now allows agents and home owners to post listings and also post a dreamy dollar figure that would “Make them Move”.

The decision is a fairly obvious strategy but one where Zillow has gone about it the right way. Does the world really need one more free listings site? Probably not. But by first aggregating a large real estate related audience, brokers and agents will take note. Offering free listings wouldn’t have been enough of an incentive but offering a free listing that reaches millions of people will.

Still, they will face an uphill battle if they are only passive. Trulia, a site with the most to lose from folks like Yahoo Real Estate, Google Base and Zillow chasing the same problem (not to mention the fact that one competitor with zero product development, craigslist, is kicking everyones ass), goes out and crawls real estate listings, then establishes a relationship after proving it can drive quality traffic, brokerages can then switch over to a feed and they both can issue a press release. Google hits the streets and proactively courts brokerages to upload their listings to Google Base and is having some success. Google has about 1.6m homes for sale and Trulia has about a million. Zillow on day one has 167 listings according to its front page.

All of them face two central challenges: listings inherently hit them later than other sources like the MLS and they struggle for comprehensiveness in any market. That’s why I tend to think people like Yahoo Real Estate have the best chance of consumer success. Either way, good luck to Zillow; fantastic people, executing well, they will make it.

What was interesting to me, and reflecting the company’s smarts, was the respect they paid to passionate users of their product. Case in point: they briefed a well-known Phoenix Realtor and blogger and got his feedback on the roll out. He wrote up a fantastically detailed post from multiple perspectives (Realtor, industry, consumer). He posted it last night and had 10 comments from people through 3am last night.

Pat Kitano, another fantastic real estate blogger, posted the story to Realestatevoices at 12:30am PT (he lives in San Francisco).

Drew Meyers, an employee of Zillow, stayed up through the night acting effectively as a manual Technorati, tracking the launches coverage through 2am PT.

This isn’t about blogs vs mainstream media (Inman News had some fantastic coverage too), it is about something more simpler: tapping into a rich vein of passionate users. The more respect you treat them with the better results. Zillow is a fantastic example of that.