Zillow is Disrupting the Real Estate Industry

Maybe you love your job as a real estate agent. On the other hand, maybe you just are a real estate agent because it provides a flexible schedule and income. No matter what, either way, Zillow is blowing up the traditional means of listing and selling homes. Their business model is a powerful threat to the traditional real estate offices today.

Zillow has caught the real estate companies asleep at the wheel. Real estate companies might want to examine how to blow up their best practices and what new attitudes to adopt. This is no different than what Expedia, Travelocity, Booking.com has done to the travel business. It all gets down to ease of access and accurate and relevant content .

Zillow Provides All The Information

Everyone loves Google and Amazon because they make it so easy to get information quickly. Zillow took this same concept and applied it to the real estate business. Their website provides a vast inventory of real estate properties that are for sale. Not only does it tell you how much the property is selling for but displays photographs, descriptions, past historical information, real estate taxes, contact information, how many days it has been on the market, how many views, and how many saves. The questionable information is how much they estimate the value. Many real estate brokers claim the estimate can not be determined without a physical inspection.

Consumers find the Zillow website very easy to use as they can quickly sort through states, towns, price range, newest, etc to see what is currently available. This is a welcome change rather than sort through several different real estate websites, wait for a newspaper or magazine to post the listing, or simply wait to be contacted. It also provides a property owner an overview of what the asking prices are for properties in his town or neighborhood.

Zillow is Buying Homes

Zillow has continued to build its business model to be vertical as they’re now purchasing homes in Jacksonville, Florida in order to help the homeowners not have to deal with the stress of selling. They will then invest in making home improvements and re-sell the home.

The easier companies make it for people to do business the more likely they will generate not only new customers, but repeat customers. Zillow is focused on what steps they can take to make the time consuming and frustrating concept of selling or buying a home as easy as possible.

Local Real Estate Offices Need To Update

Traditional real estate offices today might want to review what activities add no value or even destroy value. New ways of thinking and acting on lessons from successful companies like Chewy.com and Zappos.com that have embraced the concept of making it easy to do business. Competing in the digital age is a big step for many real estate companies. Many continue to use old methods from decades ago that involve investing a large percentage of the marketing resources in print. We started using drones to capture aerial photographs over 10 years ago while publishing photographs and videos in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Costa Rica. Aerial photography has finally starting to be used in the greater Boston area over the past 1-2 years.

What We Can Do

At Generating Media we have been publishing video walk-through real estate tours in order to provide additional insight and information that compliment the photographs we publish for over ten years. These videos provide an effective tool for real estate agents to use to capture more listings and sales. Yet a high percentage of the real estate companies have yet adopted them as part of their promotional efforts.

If you’re a real estate company or agent looking for different results we recommend that you do things differently. Our international experiences of photography and video have provided opportunities for us to identify some new practices.