Agents: Plant a Virtual ‘For Sale’ Sign!
By: Jeff Somers, Director, Agent Services | December 7, 2006
Since launch, many of you agents and brokers out there have asked us the question "when will I be able to plant a ‘virtual for sale sign’ for my listings on Zillow?" As Lloyd mentioned last night, now you can! Any agent or broker can quickly and easily post a home for sale and edit, customize and personalize your home’s Web page on Zillow, marketing it to the millions of people on our site who plan to buy or sell a home in the near future. And the best part of all- it’s free!
To see what your listings could look like on Zillow, take a look at the post to the right, which was added today, or check out some of the great examples that are already on the site.
From our perspective, posting a home on Zillow is an incredibly powerful (and easy) way to you market your customers’ properties. If you believe that the key to an effective marketing campaign is promoting your listings where the potential buyers are, then Zillow makes perfect sense. As one of the most-visited real estate sites in the country, and with 3.2 million visitors just last month, we can offer you the exposure you want for you and your listings.
You can learn more about our posting process by visiting the "What Zillow Can Do For You" page or you can start posting homes for sale right now. In addition, here are my five quick tips to maximizing your posting on Zillow:
- Register on Zillow and create your agent profile. This is where you’ll enter your photo and your personal contact information which will appear next to all your listings on Zillow; be sure to include a link to your own Web site!
- Use My Estimator to create an Owner’s Estimate. We recognize that a Zestimate is a starting point (after all, we haven’t been in the home and you have), so use this tool to create a revised estimate of the home’s value and communicate any renovations or features that we may be missing to potential buyers. Think of this as a way to help you and the homeowner communicate how you arrived at your asking price. And don’t forget to make this estimate public — that way it will appear on the home’s detail page for any prospective buyer to see.
- Upload photos — lots of them. Everyone knows a picture is worth a thousand words, and on Zillow you can upload as many pictures as you’d like.
- Add a "What the Owner Loves" description. This is a really easy way for your client to share, in their words, what they love about their house. I also recommend adding in some details about the neighborhood, as we all know location is key to real estate.
- Keep your data fresh. Every week we will send you an email asking you to update the status of your postings. Please be sure to keep your postings up to date and accurate so that customers will know the real story.
We hope that you’ll find great success with this new program- don’t wait to get started!
- Stumble it!
- Categories: Real Estate, Real Estate Industry, Zestimate, Zillow
Comments
21 Comments so far
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Jodi on December 8, 2006 5:15 am
We are a broker with thousands of listings. Do you have any plans to allow us to do bulk uploads of listings to zillow?
milton on December 8, 2006 6:33 am
Will you be posting Rentals in the fututre and are you taking xml Feeds ?
Reuben Moore on December 8, 2006 10:47 am
Well, I would very much like to try your service - but, your system will not accept my Agent Profile Information - What’s up with that? Thanks!
Drew M from Zillow on December 8, 2006 12:49 pm
Jodi-
While we can’t go into specifics of future product releases, please consider your suggestion noted. Much of our prioritization of features is based on user feedback.
Milton-
Same answer as above. Thanks for the feedback.
Reuben-
Please bear with us while we work out some of these bugs. We have gotten heard this from several agents and our engineers are diagnosing as we speak. Thanks for your patience.
Update: This most likely stems from the fact that you are using & in your title. Please change to “and” to correct.
Maria Mekus on December 9, 2006 6:44 am
Can Zillow change this….I do a search on ACTIVE homes in Tracy, CA. Eleven homes show up on the map. I go ahead and click on one of the homes to view it. Next I want to go back to the list of 11 Tracy (active for sale) homes, so I click the Back button in internet explorer (…you should provide a back button in zillow). So I go to the previous page, and all categories are now re-checked again….BUT I just wanted to view the rest of the 11 actives - I didn’t care about the sold homes, etc.
I feel this will be very frustrating for any buyers looking for active home information. Can you fix that? Otherwise I love your site - now you are finally competing with realtor.com, but we all know that zillow will be better.
kat on December 9, 2006 12:15 pm
Hi - love the new features, but none of my pics have shown up, I have uploaded them twice, and yes, they are reduced to small size like 24k.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
David G from Zillow.com on December 9, 2006 5:50 pm
KAT -
Thanks. Sorry about your struggles with photo uploads. We looked into it and repaired a bug this afternoon that addressed photo upload and posting problems. Please try again when you get the chance and if it doesn’t work, please e-mail me with details about the browser you are using [davidg at z.c]. Thanks again.
kait on December 9, 2006 7:11 pm
OK - I’m having the same problems as Maria above. The back button takes me back out to the whole US, where I have to zoom in and narrow down AGAIN…
Another question - is it possible, when clicking on a flag, regardless of color, and you bring that property up on a map - usually in satellite view - that the pinpointer can be present so you know which house you’re looking at? The only way to really tell which house it is, is if you select “view side-by-side maps”. It seems as though the overlay is missing, compared to earlier versions.
Terry Smith on December 11, 2006 10:55 am
Hey Drew,
I tried to sign up Friday to enter listings. Wouldn’t take cc info, got into day, set up first listing
spent about 15 minutes, it timed out, everthing went away, please let me know when bugs are worked out, I have abunch of listings I would like to enter.
Thanks
TX Realtor
Drew M from Zillow on December 11, 2006 12:38 pm
Terry-
Can you please send me the e-mail address for your Zillow account in addition to what browser you are using? I’ll see if I can find the cause of this issue. My e-mail address is drewm at z dot com
Karl Kramer on December 11, 2006 4:22 pm
Thank you once again to Zillow for changing the face of Real Estate as we know it. And alss, thanks for using my listing on this page, that was neat to show the kids! You system was fairly easy to use, frustrating at times, but nothing that could not be worked through to get the listings on.
This is a powerful tool and is driving traffic to my listings in just a couple short days!
I have signed up to use the API information. However, I am not able to get it into my site. Could you have one of your guru’s drop me a line regarding this. I have read the doc’s but it is over my head.
Thanks again!
Karl Kramer
Drew M from Zillow on December 11, 2006 4:47 pm
Karl-
Thank you for your warm words-I’m glad you like our new features we’ve built!
Regarding the API-have you checked out the Zillow API forum (www.zillowapi.com)? There is some useful advice in the Examples section of the forum to help get you going.
kait on December 11, 2006 6:46 pm
so, everyone’s questions are getting answered BUT mine! i love this site, so please help me with the “back” button after narrowing a search and not having to go through the search AGAIN. also, the map that appears does not use the pinpointer… layering? helpful hints would be great!
David G from Zillow.com on December 11, 2006 9:59 pm
KIAT -
Instead of the back button, click on “view large map”. The link is just below the map. That will take you back to the map at the street level. If you start your search using an address, or a ZIP code, the back button takes you back to that level. I’m going to pass on your feedback — and will get back to you about the pin-pointer.
Jason T from Zillow.com on December 18, 2006 3:10 pm
Hi Kait and Maria,
The back button functionality was fixed last week. Please let us know if you still have problems. Thanks!
Jamie on March 4, 2007 8:24 am
Last night during the wee hours, I added our home to be listed “for sale”. I tried uploading photos, but couldn’t find the “upload” button. Thought I’d try again this morning - well, still can’t seem to figure out why/where the upload is. Please help!
Jeff Somers- Zillow on March 7, 2007 3:03 pm
Jamie-
Jeff from Zillow, here. I think the best way to handle this would be to sign in on Zillow, then go to the “My Zillow” area. From there, you should be able from the left column click on Favorite Homes. You should see your home there. You can click on the home to upload photos or click on the plus sign (+) where it says Upload Photos. From there you should be able to upload your photos. Please let me know how that goes for you.
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Collin County Real Estate on September 11, 2007 1:13 pm
I have also been having the same problems. I will have to use some of the advice given here. Wish me luck.