Zillow scores Houston listings
HAR will feed data on more than 60,000 properties
By Matt Carter, Monday, November 3, 2008.
Zillow.com has reached an agreement to automatically receive more than 60,000 listings from the nation's second-largest Realtor association, the Houston Association of Realtors, the companies said today.
Launched a year ago, Zillow's listings feed program allows any broker, multiple listing service or vendor with multiple listings to push them to Zillow automatically.
The program now brings information on more than 3 million live listings to the real estate portal, formerly known primarily for its automated property valuations.
The Houston Association of Realtors (HAR) is only the second multiple listing service (MLS) to agree to feed listings directly to Zillow. MLS Property Information Network, a privately owned MLS serving the New England area, agreed to begin sending information on about 60,000 listings in March (see story).
Zillow also gets listings from technology vendors that accept feeds from MLSs, such as Threewide Corp., which Zillow says provides listings from more than 120 MLSs.
Also among the hundreds of companies Zillow claims as partners in the listings feed program are industry giants like Realogy, Homes & Land, and Prudential California-Nevada-Texas Realty.
Real estate agents and homeowners who don't have a feed can upload individual listings to Zillow, and third-party listing syndicators like Point2 Technologies Inc. also feed listings to multiple sites.
Michigan's biggest multiple listing service, Realcomp, announced this summer that it would send listings to Point2 when authorized by member brokers and agents. Point2 boasts more than 30 listing syndication partners, including Zillow, Trulia, Cyberhomes, eBay, Google Base, and Homescape.
The listings HAR's 26,000 members provide to Zillow will include a property description with up to 16 photos and contact information for the listing agent. Each will link back to the HAR Web site, HAR.com, where consumers will find more information about the home, neighborhood, listing agent and brokerage.
Spencer Rascoff, Zillow's chief operating officer, said the partnership gives Zillow better coverage in the Houston area, while HAR members and sellers get additional free marketing for listings.
HAR Chairman Michael Levitin said the association is continuously looking for ways to maximize marketing exposure for members and listings, and that Zillow's Web traffic "offers a tremendous marketing opportunity for our agents and their sellers."
Zillow claims the site attracted 5.4 million unique users in September, two-thirds of whom were planning to buy or sell now or in the near future.
HAR has actively distributed its members' property listings data to a number of third-party sites, and Levitin said the association will continue to send listings to Cyberhomes, Google Base, Homes.com and Realtor.com.
HAR president and CEO Bob Hale is a longtime champion of public-facing MLS Web sites. During a July panel discussion at Inman Real Estate Connect San Francisco, Hale said HAR generates about 600,000 free leads for members a year, with agents and brokers receiving a monthly report detailing leads, click-throughs, and listing views generated (see story).
***
What's your opinion? Leave your comments below or send a letter to the editor.
All rights reserved. This content may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in part or in whole, without written permission of Inman News. Use of this content without permission is a violation of federal copyright law.
You must login or register to post a comment.
Submitted by Jim Brown on November 3, 2008 - 4:32pm.
Well, the question for HAR (and its members' listing clients) is whether Zillow will be allowed to include disparaging comments about the houses on display. This has been Zillow's modus operandi elsewhere and it doesn't exactly help sustain strong home price values.