Real Estate Website Zillow.com recently launched a rental listing and search service. Anyone can now list a home for rent on Zillow.com for a fee of $9.95 for 180 days and the listing will be featured in the area the property is located. Each listing can include unlimited photos, a full list of property features, property details, a link to an external Web site for the property, and personal contact information.
According to Zillow’s press release, “Zillow.com is the second-largest real estate Web site, according to Hitwise. On average, 8.3 million unique visitors came to Zillow each month this year, up 60 percent over 2008.”
Being a Las Vegas Property Manager, I feel this could be another great marketing tool so I decided to try it out. Here are some of my thoughts after uploading a few properties:
- It is pretty easy to navigate around
- Uploading photos was very easy
- Once you add the property address, much of the property information auto populates including schools, which is nice
- They need to add an option to select “no” in the pets section
- I couldn’t find the area where you can add a link to an external website, I probably didn’t look hard enough
- After each listing it would require me to re-enter my credit card info even though I checked marked the box requesting it remember my information
An area of concern is that this service has been available now for over two weeks and there are only a handful of rental listings for an area I serivce, Las Vegas. I didn’t check other markets to see how many rentals were listed but being Las Vegas is a big market, this was not a good sign. Without a large number of rental listings, potential tenants won’t be using Zillow to search for homes for rent.
Overall I really like this new service and I think it will be used by potential renters and will be a great marketing tool for property managers and landlords.
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Hey, Sara from Zillow here! Thanks for covering this new functionality on Zillow. You’re right that we need to grow the number of people that know about it for it to be effective. Because it is so new, we don’t have a lot of properties advertised. However, the few that are there are getting all the attention! That said, this was just our first release, and we have a lot of bugs and enhancements to the service to add.
1) In Feb the “no” to pets is coming.
2) Link – You can put it in the copy, but it won’t be hot. We’re still playing around with this. Right now the idea is that we want to send the landlord/property manager as many leads as possible, so we are trying to drive people to use the form. We’ve found they are a lot less likely to send a lead on a new site that they click off to. People we spoke with said that they would prefer to get a hard lead than an incremental click on their site. We’ll keep watching this.
3) Hmmm… the credit card should work. Some engineers are taking another look at that now.
With regards to the number of rental listings on the site. Right now the only way to get listings on the site is to manually enter them. We are currently working on a way to ingest listings via a feed. We have a number of people lined up ready to send us more listings once we are able to do this.
Sara,
I thought listings placed on Postlets.com were automatically fed over to Zillow.com? Is that not the case?
In regards to:
2) I have been using Craigslist.org for a long time to promote my rental listings and I have found that I have a better chance of capturing the lead if I can get them on my website. By getting them to my website, they can view all MY rental listings and this increases my chances of capturing the lead. Since we are paying for this service, I think we should be allowed to have a live link even if it’s no follow. Just my 2 cents…
Thanks for responding
P.S. If you check Zillow.com’s back links on Yahoo, WannaNetwork.com is your #14 back link