Real Estate Website Zillow to Begin Charging Agents for Listings

A couple of big changes are underway at Zillow.com. Zillow is an online real estate site where home buyers can search for homes for sale, find home prices, see home values, view recently sold homes, and check mortgage rates. This information is free to home buyers. The company had provided the resources where sellers were able to post their properties for sale on the website for free. Today, however, that all changed.

On December 14^th, Zillow announced that beginning today, in order to post listings for sale on its web site, real estate agents, brokers, and individual home sellers will be charged $9.95 per listing for 180 days or, if the property seller has 50 or more listings, he or she can submit a bulk listing feed to the site for free.

The company has also indicated that they would begin adding the ability for landlords to advertise their for lease properties on the site. Like properties listed for sale, bulk rental listings (those in excess of 50) could be posted through an automated feed for free. Manual listings, however, would be subject to the listing fee of $9.95.

Current listings in Zillow's site will expire in January 2010. If home sellers want to extend their listings, they will have to resubmit the listing as a "featured listing" and pay the fee-unless of course they have more than 50 properties on the site.

Zillow has decided to start charging real estate agents, brokers, builders and homeowners who want to enter individual for-sale listings as an incentive for them to provide accurate, up-to-date information on their properties, which will provide more quality information for users of the information. Of course, this decision to charge for listings will also generate additional revenue for the company, as revenues were previously generated primarily through advertisements on the Zillow's web site.

Zillow currently has around 4 million listings nationwide on its site. I suspect that this decision to begin charging for some listings will decrease the number of listings only slightly-and most of those listings may have been outdated anyway.

Zillow is one of the most popular real estate web sites visited. The site attracts more than 8 million unique visitors monthly. Even with this change to charge a small fee to post listings, it would probably be in a home seller's best interest to pay if that gets their property noticed by potential buyers.

Source: www.zillow.com