Zillow lands first MLS deal
New England MLS to begin feeding property information to national site
By Inman News, Wednesday, March 19, 2008.Bookmarking Sites
Seattle-based Zillow.com scored its first partnership with a multiple listing service to feed for-sale property information to the national real estate site.
MLS Property Information Network, a privately owned MLS serving the New England area, will begin feeding listings to Zillow on a daily basis, the companies announced today.
MLS PIN has about 30,000 participants, and the organization manages a database of approximately 60,000 homes for sale.
Zillow began taking feeds of listings in November, and since then has announced partnerships for listings from such industry heavyweights as Realogy, which feeds some 700,000 listings to Zillow; Homes & Land, which publishes several print magazines and operates the HomesAndLand.com Web site; and Prudential California/Nevada/Texas Realty and real estate publisher Network Communications Inc.
Each listing from MLS PIN will include a description of the property with multiple photos and contact information for the listing agent, including links back to the listing brokerage's Web site where consumers can find more information and connect with a sales associate.
In addition to providing their customers with free marketing exposure to their current listings, MLS PIN is participating in Zillow's Virtual Sold Sign program, which stores attribution for previous listing agents or brokers on a home's lasting history at its details page on Zillow.
Zillow says that approximately 4 million people visit its site each month.
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Submitted by Richard Greenwood on March 20, 2008 - 8:03am.
I wonder why there is such a discrepancy between the traffic reported by www.Compete.com and the folks at Zillow. Compete.com says under 2.5 million while Zillow says approximately 4 million.
Whatever the number, I applaude the great work of the Zillow team and look forward to their continued growth.
Submitted by Steve Loper on April 1, 2008 - 10:18am.
Zillow is very sharp in what they do. They gave the same data to the end consumer that people in the biz have.
They are starting http://fatdoor.com as a social networking site. With the user base from zillow tied into a social networking platform, they are poised to be the google of real estate.
You can go back and forth with whether the values are 100% correct, but they have given the consumer the same data agents use. Zillow knows that if you bring the people, agents will follow.
http://steveloper.com
Submitted by who_me on April 6, 2008 - 2:29pm.
As to traffic, huge differences can occur depending on what is counted. For instance, each individual graphic or photo on a web page can be counted as a separate item, even though they may (or should) be logically counted as a single item: are all 10 photos of a home counted separately, so that there is a "hit" to a web page plus 10 more "hits", one per photo, for a total of 11 "hits", or is just the hit to the main web page counted as a single "hit"? As a result, absolute traffic numbers and comparisons between them mean little in the web biz.