DISQUS

Thanks Joe. 2 points of clarification:
- Mr. Brunson made the $250 offer; Zillow did not. When we accepted the offer, he rescinded it. I don't know why but I hope to get to the bottom of this today.
- iZillow.net is not an iPhone App, it is a website optimized for the iPhone. I'm sure it sounds like I'm nitpicking but this distinction is important to our API TOU. Due to our raw data licensing agreements, most of our API's are only available to website developers but not on other proprietary platforms. The one exception is the mortgage API which is available to iPhone and other App developers.

Hi Bill,

You've misread this story but that's understandable; it's a bit tangled up at this stage. This is purely a trademark issue. iZillow.net will not be shut down if the developer stops abusing our trademark.

The API and our developer community is an important piece of the Zillow marketing plan and we greatly appreciate the reach that it gives our content. Use of our API is subject to TOU's. Some API data may not be used in apps (only in "web sites") but any such restrictions relate to our raw data licensing agreements. For example; we can make mortgage rate data available to iPhone App developers but not home facts yet home facts may be used in a web page optimized for mobile browsers (like the iZillow.net site does.)

Wrapping up: iZillow.net is a great site and one we'd like to see continue to operate but only if they stop abusing our brand.

There's so much FUD, nuance and magic around SEO that I thought twice about commenting here but this post now has quite a bit of reach, so here goes ...

Online marketing is a personal decision and what works best will differ from site to site and user to user. I also want to be clear that I am not defending Trulia and that I resent having Zillow lumped with Trulia in this regard. if SEO buttered my bread and I was a Realtor I would might well not list on Trulia and I certainly would not blog there so some of this post's advice is sound. And to actually execute on this teaparty you'd have to start by removing all listings from Realtor.com. Picking on Zillow here is disingenuous at best and at worst, is shooting yourself in the foot.

When it comes to partnering with Zillow to improve your SEO, this is bad advice and the post neglects a couple of key points. Honestly, I can't even tell why Zillow even made it into this story:
1) The homes you list are on Zillow long (years) before they're on your listing website. Not sending your listings to Zillow will not keep those addresses out of Zillow's database (but will keep you from getting great links from our site.)
2) Good SEO optimization requires getting followed links to your content. Zillow is the only large RE site that will give you followed links to your listings on your sites.
3) A Realtor can build a PR3 or PR4 profile page on Zillow with much less effort than it takes on a blog or website. For many pro's, their Zillow profile is the most authoritative page they control. Our site allows an unlimited number of followed links from your profile page. For a Realtor trying to move your site or blog up in the SERPs, I'd be surprised if you found a more effective and efficient SEO tactic.

SEO is a karma-based economy. You get what you give. Zillow gives RE pro's more tools to pump up their SEO than any other site and Zillow is not employing sneaky tricks on listings links.

Bottom line: if you have two Realtors with the same understanding of SEO, the one using Zillow will outrank the one that's not.

Thanks Joe - I'll get our legal team on it.

d'oh ... "if" this ... disqus needs to give us 5 minutes for edits

Errrr Joe ... you might want to check is this is a paid placement.

WOW - very, very cool. The kite just runs and spins a generator. I've hung under a kite like that and they really pull. This energy technology stuff is just fascinating.

If you were an advertiser Joe, these numbers would mean something to you. You're not our target customer so you're excused for not getting it ... but really, if you're going to have an opinion on this stuff, please try to understand what's going on here.

Publishing reach metrics is simply good merchandising for a web site. We are not trying to try to impress you, Joe, and this number is not supposed to mean anything to you. We are not trying to make a comment on the state of our business with this metric so please stop misinterpreting these numbers that way. We are simply using the industry standard metric to explain our product to our advertising customers.As you know, our competitors make a lot of wild claims but reach is an indisputable way to communicate to our advertisers the benefit of partnering with an industry-leading service like Zillow.com. This "merchandising" is the equivalent of putting your wares out in the storefront window - and if you think we shouldn't be doing that, you're simply horribly wrong.

I hope you now finally understand that this has nothing to do with bragging about business performance. Please stop misreading these metrics as a comment on the state of our business. Or at least know that when you do, you're being a dumb-azz.

Jennifer - you're missing the point. SEO is not analogous to syndication because SEO is typically one dimension of a syndication strategies (syndicated content should also include inbound links.)

An "analogy" is when you use one thing to make a point about another. Here, your "things" are too closely related to be analogous. What you are doing is creating unnecessary confusion for anyone who actually understands this stuff.

If Realtors weren't being duped over this issue, I wouldn't have bothered to ask you to correct your post but some of these sites are intentionally competing with agents for Google-juice. You are recommending something as "like an SEO service" which in reality will actually hurt an agents' SEO.

I hope that makes sense. If not, please contact me and I'll explain in more detail.

Hi Jennifer, it's David from Zillow!

Nice find; this is really cool. Agents battle to keep track of all the places their listings are posted and this tool fills that gap excellently.

One correction though ... "SEO service for your listings" is not accurate and it is not smart for a Realtor to evaluate this product that way. Zillow is actually one of very few services that will improve a Realtor's SEO if they syndicate their listings. Many listings sites go out of their way to ensure that the agent does not see any SEO benefit from their listings by using nofollow's and non-301 redirects. If you check the listing source code on a few of these services you'll see what I mean. Please clarify this issue in your post.

Joe -

Your suggestion is not only ridiculous, it's impossible. To use median sales to calculate the HVI, two thing would need to happen ...
1) We would need all homes in the country to be sold at the same time ...
2) We would need the sales price of all of those sales to be instantaneously and accurately made public.

When both of these things happen, it will become possible to use the median sales price to understand home value trends. I give you my word that on that day, I will join you in the campaign to have Zillow change the HVI calculation. I'm ready. Just let me know when it happens ...

Laurie -

Joe's got you a bit confused. Understandable. This stats stuff can be confusing but I think it's important for a Realtor to understand how housing data is aggregated - especially those indexes that are commonly cited in the MSM. Please bear with me as I explain what is a rather dry topic ...

First, Zillow certainly does report recent sales prices on the site. It's EXTREMELY important data at the home level and recently sold homes on Zillow get flagged as such. The Zillow Home Value Index that is widely reported in the media is a function of sales prices. Recent sales prices are the most important input to Zestimate calculations.

Now here's what Zillow does not do ... when we aggregate home value statistics, we don't only consider the value of those homes that have recently sold. Instead, we use the (estimated) value of all of the homes in the area and report the median of those values as the Home value Index. We don't report median sales values because that metric only considers the values of those homes that have recently sold. Obviously today's sale price is the best measure of the value of a home but in the aggregate, the price of that handful of homes that recently sold is actually not the most useful information because it leaves out all far more homes than it considers. A median sales analysis is therefore a view into just one slice of the market and is heavily skewed by current demand. So, median sales is a relatively inaccurate measure of the trend in value of all homes - specially in a changing market. Anyone who worked in Real Estate over the past 5 years will remember how use of this metric by NAR largely caused David Lereah to continue to report "a great time to buy" when markets were already declining.

I hope I've adequately explained the need for something other than median sales analysis. Enter the home value index. Just like other economic indexes, a home value index tries to normalize sales data to remove market noise. There are currently two approaches to this; either extrapolate the values of a normalized "basket" of sales of representative homes types ... or ... estimate and aggregate the value of all homes in the geography.

The Case-Schiller Index, OFHEO and Zillow's Home Value Index (HVI) are the three indexes that you currently see cited by the MSM. Noticeably absent from this group in recent years is NAR's median sales analysis. While the usefulness of aggregate home values to your current buyers is arguable, a Realtor will be asked about the trends that are reported by the media and so I believe it's a good idea to understand how the popular indexes are calculated.

The CSI is probably the most popular today. Very simply speaking, it uses a normalized set of home sales, just like the CPI uses a standard basket of groceries to measure inflation. The challenge with the CSI is that it needs lots of recent sales data and so can't report very granularly on home values in local geographies. In the city-level geographies that they do report on, we've seen a very close correlation between Zillow's HVI and the CSI. OFHEO uses a similar approach to CSI but since it only considers sales eligible for conforming mortgages, it has grossly under-reported the values lost in high-value states like California. Zillow's approach is to calculate the Home Value Index in a bottom-up approach that considers the estimated value of all homes. This simple yet thorough aggregation allows us to report home value trends at a much finer granularity than the other indexes (all the way down to the ZIP level.)

Zillow uses the median Zestimate value to calculate the Home Value Index. This calculation gives us two benefits:
1) Considering the value of all homes gives us a lot of data to work with and thereby enables us to report on local home value trends. This approach considers way more home values than either the median sales or basket index approaches do.
2) Selecting the median estimate gives us a really robust way of negating the variance in accuracy in individual homes' estimates. Since Zestimates that are inaccurate have as much random chance of being high as they do of being low, selecting the median Zestimate ensures an acurrate measure of home value trends in the aggregate.

I told you it was going to be boring but I hope this topic is clearer now - if you read all the way through my comment, thank you!

Let me get this straight ... are you really saying that having ZERO reporting and disclosure on accuracy is preferable to using a statistic that you don't understand? This post makes no sense ... unless of course your only motive is to bait me ... but I thought you said you were getting over those impulses?

Fantastic initiative. Best of luck with this, Joe. As I think about the legal profession, the pro bono provision is one of the few redeeming qualities of the profession's brand image in my mind as a consumer. A legitimate pro bono provision in Real Estate could have a similar positive impact on home buyers. You should bounce this idea off someone at the NAR.

Joe -

Real Estate is a seasonal business. If you look at web traffic to real estate sites over multiple years you'll learn that a Q4 downturn in volume is to be expected - http://tinyurl.com/7fd3ec

Zillow's traffic is actually surprisingly strong for this time of year (touch wood.) In November Zillow had 5,3 million unique users only slightly down from our peak months.

One reason that Zillow traffic is up is Mortgage rates are way down. I don't know about the Grinch but Santa Claus is delivering mortgages and refi's around 5% on Zillow Mortgage Marketplace which is a VERY welcome gift for home-buyers and anyone needing to refinance.

Thanks for noticing, Bill.

Few thoughts on this. Operating a vibrant mortgage marketplace with a growing database of real mortgage quotes will increasingly allows us to aggregate fascinating real-time mortgage data. We're pleased with the early success of this mortgage business and as you've noted, marketing efforts are starting to pay off nicely as word of mouth spreads about the shopping experience on Zillow. And frankly, it's been great to have good news for home buyers and owners in the midst of all the doom and gloom in Real Estate. Zillow has a phenomenal PR team and now our lenders are benefiting from their ability to get the good word out about low rates in Zillow Mortgage Marketplace. The fact that we don't buy any of that traffic means we can continue to give lenders free access to leads on Zillow while also selling high-performance mortgage advertising at industry-beating value to high-volume retailers. But we still have LOTS of room for growth and observations like yours will be very important to making that happen - so thanks again!

2 related resources:
Rate explorer: zillow.com/mortgage-rate-explorer/
Rate widgets: zillow.com/mortgage/widgets/

"what’s with the toothpaste imagery?"

The Stranger is a free, independent and gloriously irreverent rag in Seattle. Their website proclaims the Stranger; "Seattle's only Newspaper." Toothpaste is from an August '07 cover but it seems unrelated to the lead story. The Stranger is known for its provocative cover art. More strangeness here: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/CoverArt?yea...

Thanks for the heads-up Joe - I'll let javitron know that he can unsubscribe from that e-mail if he wants to.

Transparency is definitely not a "good news only" game - I know you struggle with that - but my experience is that most people would rather not have their heads in the sand.

PS ... RE: the CNET link ... do yourself a favor and go for the new MacBook ... you can always use a pink desktop image if it's the color after but OSX is so incredibly more efficient than Windoze and the new multi-touch mousepad makes web-browsing even more enjoyable - highly recommended!

You should use the twitteriffic app on iPhone for a bit and then ask yourself if this is still a good idea. Very invasive. A feed and a list of search engine results are not all that dissimilar in their content - can you imagine what a mess goog would be if adwords were inline? I know your response to this critique is "personalization" but honestly, you're dreaming there - the (micro) news I subscribe to certainly tells you much less about me than my purchases do and yet, more than a decade later, amzn still can't make recommendations accurate enough that I'd want them in a feed. As others have pointed out, the plumber ad is going to be spam 999/1000 and it's in your face spam. Ads around feeds however will work (and google will probably own that market) but ads in feeds sounds unlikely to cross the chasm.

I hope you're right, Joe.

Just to remind readers, Zillow offers Zestimates via a free API to web publishers. You can get a Zillow API key and learn about the API data we offer here: http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/APIOverview.htm. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about Zillow's APIs [davidg AT z DOTCOM]

Hi Mark, it's David from Zillow -

A new study out today has an answer to your question about the value of listing on Zillow. According to this independent study, traffic from Zillow to brokers' websites converts better than that from the other sites. On average, the conversion rate of visitors from Zillow on a brokers' site was 2.5 that of the other sites in the study. Check it out: http://www.zillowblog.com/study-shows-traffic-f...

Hey Geeky Swedes - great blog! Here's a videao I took of the move: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc2JQbUqLY8

Hi, it's David G from Zillow,

Zillow is NOT BANNED in Arizona. Thanks for all of the supportive responses to this story. This 2007 blog post still gets regular comments so I thought I'd post an update (if Mashable is reading, please consider updating your post.)

This story ended well for Zillow users in Arizona. Local government decided to clarify AZ state law to specifically exempt tools like Zillow from the regulations that govern the state's professional appraisers. Free instant home value estimates are not appraisals (Zestimate values cannot be used as an appraisal to procure a mortgage etc.) The board of appraisers subsequently withdrew its cease and desist letters. Zillow Zestimate Values, Real Estate Market Reports and now, Mortgage quotes, are still available in AZ (and everywhere else.)

Joe - no one is suggesting that a consumer relies on Zillow for comps vs using a professional. Quite the opposite ... Zillow is a great place to FIND a local expert.

Hi, it's David G from Zillow,

Don't you think that "shit" and "crap" are a rather extreme ways of describing this issue? I'll take a shot at addressing your critique but in future, please consider contacting me for comment.

The blogger you are quoting is incorrect. The comps algorithm on Zillow does not just a list of recent sales in a set radius but rather it attempts to select nearby homes that have recently sold and that are similar to the home in question. It's important to remember that the list on Zillow is a list of suggested possible comps that is intended to be paired down by the user and so, we cast a wide net and let the user select the most relevant comps from the suggested list and so, you should certainly expect some of the homes in Zillow's list of possible comps to be poor comparables. I do think it's a cool feature that some MLS' allow agents to only pull recent sales within a sub-division at the click of a button and I agree that this is important when dealing with spec-homes in housing tracts but you can certainly do the same thing by filtering the list using the map of comps on Zillow - it may take a few more clicks but there's not a huge difference between approaches.

And using Zillow, users can search and filter all recent sales for a detailed online comps analysis that bypasses the recommended comps list. Frankly, this is the most thorough approach and the one I would expect many pro's to take. The blogger that you're citing in this post is rather naive to believe that any algorithm will give him a completely accurate comps list with a single click. That's simply not how a skilled pro chooses comps.

Lastly - please remember, Joe, that Zillow was never intended to replace the MLS and Zillow's users don't not have access to the MLS.