Triple Play Real Estate Conference Recap

Last week Zillow exhibited at the Triple Play convention in Atlantic City (PA, NJ and NY state Realtor show). The goal of exhibiting was to educate agents and brokers on how they could upload their listings to Zillow for free, and to answer any questions about Zillow that might come up. We did end up getting a number of visitors to our booth, which was great! The top five things we heard from attendees were:

1. How do you come up with your Zestimates?
2. My client told me about your site. Can you tell me more about it?
3. I am posting my listings to your site and I love it! The price to list is right!
4. I heard about Zillow in an educational session today. I need to know more about you.
5. Do you have any literature I can use in Listing Presentations as to why I advertise on Zillow?

These questions and comments sparked some great conversations. Thanks to those of you who stopped by to talk to us! For those who didn’t have the benefit of being at the show, our responses sounded something like this:

1. In short, we take all the public data we can get our hands on (including the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, tax assessor information and transactional data), and churn it through a mathmatical formula, which spits out a Zestimate - our estimate of a home’s worth. To find out more, please visit the section of our site where we discuss What is a Zestimate, Our Data Accuracy and Our Data Coverage.
2. Zillow is both a research tool for consumers and a free marketing platform for real estate professionals. Approximately 4 million people visit the site each month, 90% of whom own a home, 70% are thinking about buying or selling a home within the next 1-2 years. Approximately 25% of our visitors are real estate professinals. We encourage agents to post their listings on Zillow (it’s free!) and to check out Zillow before heading into to a listing presentation, as there is a good chance the site will be brought up.
3. Great! If you aren’t posting your listings today, click here to get started. We spoke with one agent who had a listing presentation for a $1.5 million dollar home this week from a lead she got on Zillow. It works!
4. Why are educators talking about this site in classes? Because they know the public is using the site and you need to be too! 4 million sets of eyeballs coming to the site every month is an audience that you can’t afford to ignore.
5. We ran out of literature before the show’s end. Sorry to everyone who stopped by and walked away empty-handed! Please make sure you are signed up to receive the periodical newsletters we send out and you will always have the latest information on what marketing opportunities are available.

There was one woman in particular who was happy to have stopped by the booth, as she was the winner of a 19 inch monitor we gave away- Denise Broesler (pictured at left). Not only is Denise a full time broker/Realtor, but she is also a volunteer fire fighter. Be sure to check out her Web site for a free eCalendar!

Overall, it was a great show and we enjoyed talking with various real estate professionals from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I was especially excited to learn that there is no sales tax on clothes in Atlantic City, as there is outlet shopping right outside the conference hall! Realtors and tax-free shopping- what a great week!