Ready for a Real Estate Royal Rumble?

Following the announcement that they are finally seeking broker feeds (see Zillow News), Zillow also has some big news on the local search front too.

They've lured well respected search expert Vanessa Fox away from Google, which is a pretty big win for the Seattle startup. Vanessa helped build Google Webmaster Central  and regularly represents the company at search engine strategy conferences (see her Wikipedia profile for more).

So what's a local and vertical search expert to do at a real estate valuation site?

I suspect that the two announcements are not unrelated and that along with a renewed push into aggregating listings, Zillow is looking at ways to make their listings and neighborhoods float higher in the organic search indexes.

I get the feeling this is the beginning of an all-out battle to own real estate search and Zillow is quietly stacking its deck with heavyweights. Anyone else in the space should be readying themselves to go the distance.

(h/t Real Central VA)

Technorati Tags: Zillow, Vanessa Fox, Real Estate Search, Real Estate, Real Estate 2.0

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