70% of “For Sale” Postings Offered By Agents, 30% by Owners
By: Rich Barton, CEO | December 12, 2006
When we opened Zillow up to For Sale and Make Me Move postings last week, a question I kept getting asked was “What percentage of for sale postings do you think will be offered by agents vs. owners?” Well, we now have a few days of postings data, and the answer is: 70% of our “For Sale” postings are offered by agents, complete with their contact phone numbers, email addresses, and, in many cases agent photographs and links off Zillow to their own Web sites.
This marketing for homes and agents is free, so it’s no surprise that as of this writing we have more than 7,700 of them and growing. I must admit to having what must be the adult version of a “myspace” experience as I browse these postings on Zillow. I’ve found that the pictures of not just the houses, but the agents offering the houses are powerful and pull me in. I’m finding I want to learn more about these agents. Who are her other customers? How many sales did she make last year and where? Why did he choose that photo of himself to upload, I wonder?
It follows that if 70% of For Sale postings are by agents, then 30% are offered by owners. Additionally, we have 4,000 “Make Me Move” postings (as of this blog post) which are all offered by owners. These MMM postings are unique to Zillow and are really intriguing on a number of levels that we’ve already blogged on and I’m sure will be blogging more on in the future.
Note: a good way to get a view of lots of postings on a map is to simply type in the name of a city in the search box, and not a specific address. For example here is the Los Angeles search.
Don’t forget to scroll down the screen and start playing with sorting, flag toggling (controlled from the map key), and filtering (also in the map key). I think you’ll find our new search, sort, and filter engine is lightning fast. Another usability tip: hold down the control key when you click through to a specific home and it will open that home up in a new window, so that you can preserve your search.
Image: Offered by Agent (Catherine Marcus of Sotheby’s) posting on Zillow.
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- Categories: Real Estate, Real Estate Industry, Zillow
Comments
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kait on December 12, 2006 12:47 pm
rich:
thanks for the tip on preserving my search - it’s been the bain of my searching INcapabilities! also, i’m sure you all are getting slammed at this moment, which is why the data on “recently sold” homes in the cary, nc area is showing in the millions! ce n’est possible!
Rich on December 12, 2006 1:21 pm
Kait-
You may be looking at “recently sold” for the whole country. We’ve just been trying it for Cary, NC and are getting ~5k recently sold flags. I’ll follow up offthread.
Rich
David Rea on December 15, 2006 3:25 am
Rich:
Please email me so that I can discuss with you a killer idea I have to further skyrocket your traffic.
David
Gary Fisher on December 18, 2006 4:41 pm
As TIME magazine just announced, YOU is the Person of the Year. How is this affecting the real estate industry?
It is interesting to note that several real estate online endeavors are taking shape in the new real estate economy, being powered by the consumer. The platforms are being developed by large YOU “aggregators”, just as YouTube provided the portal for individuals to post independent content.
I believe that the infancy of this consumer-driven change is indeed right before our eyes.
There are virtual platforms in development that allow consumers to post their own offerings, listings if you will, at locations such as GoogleBase, Trulia, Craigslist, Zillow and others, providing an online marketplace for home sales. Several of these allow interested buyers to contact the sellers directly, completely bypassing brokerages and agents. Consumers already have all the technical gadgets, digital cam-corders, home offices and computers to market their own properties – in fact, some luxury properties are already being marketed via video on sites such as YouTube.
At some point we can imagine an online auction, or even a small interaction fee being charged to set interested parties up with regionalized real estate attorneys, who would pay for the transaction leads by region to monetize such a business model.
The company with the most marketing dollars to create consumer acceptance here wins, and I would like to be a part of this transformation.
The winds of change are blowing right before our eyes: Recently, the Pacific Northwest MLS pulled it’s listings feed from Realtor.com in an effort to empower the individual broker from non-broker generated leads eating into their net profit, yet last week the Houston MLS announced it is voluntarily streaming of it’s feed to GoogleBase in an effort to market Broker’s listing on a world-wide format.
Consumers can enter their lisitngs directly into these databases themselves, for FREE, thus bypassing agents and MLS’s altogether.
It seems as though the powers that be are facilitating the For Sale By Owner proposition - Another validation for the new YOU generation brought forth by Web 2.0 technologies.
John Clark on December 21, 2006 4:23 pm
My first experience with a “MAKE ME MOVE” posting.
I have been looking for a house for a client for quite some time. As a good agent I not only look at the MLS but other sources for the right house. The MLS in our area hasn’t had what they have been looking for. Well, I found it on MAKE ME MOVE…I thought.
I did a drive by and ran comps, did a property analysis and contacted the owner that posted the home. Yes, he would be willing to let us come see the home! After sending my clients to look at the neighborhood and home as well it turns out the guy hadn’t even discussed it with his wife.
Needless to say, I have disappointed clients that thought we actually had a good lead. I wasted several hours of my time and my clients also wasted a 20 mile each way drive because someone posted a MAKE ME MOVE price that really didn’t want to sell.
On line tools and marketing for FSBO and agents are great things. However, they can also be very misleading when people posting are not honest with others and have little or no idea of the cost of their irresponsible actions.
Martin on October 17, 2007 7:42 am
One of the newer online ventures that I have come accross is Zipvo. The site at Zipvo.com was created for real estate professionals enabling them to upload videos of the houses they are trying to sell. A listing with Zipvo as well as all video uploads are free. This site is a great tool for realtors enabling them to ‘sell’ their houses to anyone that has a computer.
Martin on October 28, 2007 4:50 am
You know how some things sound different on paper (or blog) than they do in your head? I was just reading through my last comment here and it sounded like I just discovered Zipvo. I actual work with them. What I meant to say was that they are one of the newer ventures that I have started working with.