It’s been talked about and teased for a while now, but Zillow is finally going to Canada. Or rather, Canada is coming to Zillow.
U.S. home searchers will be able to use Zillow to hunt for Canadian properties later this year, thanks to a new partnership between Zillow and Century 21 Canada, according to a Zillow announcement Wednesday.
The partnership will see Zillow getting a direct listing feed from Century 21 Canada that includes all of its for-sale home listings.
The companies didn’t provide much in the way of further details, declining to specify exactly when in 2018 U.S. home shoppers looking for property up North will be able to find options on Zillow, but our sources close to the deal said Century 21 listings will almost certainly be joined by Canadian listings from other sources, including brokerages and MLSs.
There are no plans right now for Zillow to launch a Canadian version of its website for Canuck home searchers looking to buy properties in their country or the U.S.
Notwithstanding all that, the coming of Canadian listings to Zillow in the U.S. is big news for Zillow and for the Canadian real estate market, and it marks a natural expansion of the real estate portal’s ambitions. Zillow first publicly confirmed it was exploring adding Canadian listings to its U.S. website to the Toronto Star back in November 2017. It further cemented the idea when Zillow executive Errol Samuelson made similar statements at an Ontario real estate conference in February this year.
Zillow’s foray into Canadian real estate comes at an especially challenging time in the national market: Canadian sales fell to a five-year low earlier this year, and prices are dropping as well. An influx of U.S. home searchers from Zillow certainly couldn’t hurt things right about now.