Zillow Free WordPress Website

[nealjones]

Has anyone seen the news that Zillow is now providing FREE Wordpress website, free domain name, free CRM, and free DiverseSolutions IDX integration - for Premiere agents? Apparently its only $10 if you're not Premiere.

That is kind of insanity. Surely they are losing money on that - all in the name of driving new advertising customers I guess.

Have to admit - I looked at the demos and they didn't suck. Not high end per se, but for $10 ... wow.

Very interested to hear what others think...

[Micheal Pannell Realtor]

it wont work in some place, Like Houston you have to be a broker to have access to the IDX feed and in Dallas/Fort Worth it will cost you an extra $30 per month for the Feed.

[MatteoP]

Easy-to-build, customizable websites are nothing new. Like so many online technologies (think Facebook and Twitter) the barrier to entry to this sort of service/platform is very low. This can be a curse as well as a blessing. Because, at the end of the day, what matters is genuine, useful content that buyers and sellers need. Creating a website is the least difficult part. Keeping the (quality) content flowing is where it matters most.

[nealjones]

The point is - FREE IDX! Free domain name! And its on wordpress. And the skins dont suck! You're right, cheap sites have been plentiful for a while but they always looked cheap. This is a decent looking site however. I mean its not REW level quality, but it *IS* Z57 or PropertyMinder level quality ... and its $10/free ... not $500 setup and $100 per month!

So the next obvious question is - if that is only $10 per month ... or FREE if I'm already paying for ads on Zillow (many of us are) ... then what *should* the price of better products be? Yes REW is better ... is it 8-20x better?

How is Zillow able to offer this for free anyway? I thought there were certain IDX fees they had to pay. Maybe this is a loss leader in an effort to kill off competition and own the realtor services market themselves? And who said Zillow is Evil! :P

[phake]

Man, it sure is a pain in the butt to have to compete with these companies that can run losses and still continue to blow through outside money.

I have to make future investments with profits of past investment. I also have to know that my invested money will have a postive rate of return.

Obviously, this is not going to make Zillow enough upfront to cover the costs of the its implementation.

But what it will provide them is a tremendous number of backlinks to their site from footer links and a larger group of agents who are dependent on them to survive.

They will now have an army of agents unknowingly creating content and gathering backlinks on "their" websites that will only further strengthen Zillow in the SERPS.

It is jsut another step in the long con, which is the takeover of our industry by these types of websites.

-Pat

[nealjones]

Haha, yep. What's Zillow worth now - $1.1 BILLION? They bought DiverseSolutions for $7.8 million. If you can wipe an entire industry out of business for another $5-10M is must seem like chump change, but with huge consolidated market upside. They're also hiring up over 100 new sales people to occupy the new DS offices in Irvine. So they're going to be going after this market pretty hard.

The big wildcard is to see how agents react. Everyone says they don't trust Zillow, but when you dangle a free (and decent) IDX website/CRM combo in front of them, it seems predictable that people will prioritize their own micro economics over the macro economics of the industry as a whole.

[joehayes101]

But what it will provide them is a tremendous number of backlinks to their site from footer links and a larger group of agents who are dependent on them to survive.

They will now have an army of agents unknowingly creating content and gathering backlinks on "their" websites that will only further strengthen Zillow in the SERPS.

That's what I was thinking!

[nealjones]

At the end of the day , how many people will NOT take the free website because of a couple links to Zillow? Its brilliant in that way - the individual benefit is greater than the individual cost. So the individual agent wins the battle, but Zillow wins the war.

Only way to really offset this effect I'd imagine, is to report this to Google as a linkfarm. Anyone going to help report it?

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answ...&answer=134413

[nealjones]

Google can discount the value of owned link farms. In fact, they seek to! As an industry, if you are worried about Zillow using these links unfairly, you should report the link farm to Google. Better success if multiple people do so:

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answ...&answer=134413

[realatrends]

I saw an email from Zillow offering low-cost websites with cheap hosting. They didn't look that bad, however, they didn't look good enough to have as a main website.