Austin Texas Real Estate

Contact Sky Realty

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact us via phone at 512.342.8744 or fill out the form to let us know how we can help.

Sky Realty Austin
4501 Spicewood Springs Rd,
Suite 1029,
Austin, TX 78759
Phone: 512-342-8744
Fax: 512-342-8745

For our Bastrop/Smithville office call 512-237-1242

For our Del Valle office call 512-538-5282

Talk With Zillow About Their Data in Austin

Posted by Curtis Reddehase on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 11:22pm. 

This is Spenser's response to my blog announcing that we would not syndicate our listings. 
 
We never mentioned Zillow, but this is an opportunity for Sky Realty and Zillow to have a 
productive conversation about the frustrations centered around the “bad public record data
on Zillow”. 
 
Do not worry Spenser I will not take what you say to be rude.
The following is comment on my post We no Longer Syndicate Our Listings

 

Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 11:41 PM: Curtis, Spencer from Zillow here. You and I have never met, and I regret that. So please don't take this to be rude when I tell you, respectfully, that this is a very bad business decision for your company, your agents, and most of all your sellers. It is the responsibility of brokers and agents to make sure that their clients' listings are wherever buyers are looking. Zillow has 8.9 million unique visitors and our traffic is growing 72% year-over-year. In most cities, we're the #1 or #2 real estate website. In fact even in Austin, where we have notoriously bad public record data on Zillow, we have a ton of traffic. We have many, many buyers on our website. Not putting your listings on a website with that many visitors -- especially when it's free to you to do so -- is a disservice to your sellers, and I'm sure it's coming up in you agents' listings presentations. The benefits of putting listings on Zillow are: 1. Exposes the listings to potential buyers (9M uniques, 25% of whom say Zillow is "their primary real estate shopping website") 2. Shows your seller that you're working to sell the home (CAR Study: 73% of sellers visit Zillow, frequently to check to see if their agent listed it there) 3. Sends free traffic to the broker website (each listing on Zillow has at least 2 links to the broker website from the listings page) 4. Improves search engine traffic for the broker website because of all the links from Zillow 5. Marginalizes the "Zestimate". When a listing is added to Zillow, the Zestimate comes off the map page, and is pushed all the way down the listing page. Also, we recalculate the Zestimate based on the property attributes in the listing feed, so the best way to improve and marginalize an inaccurate Zestimate is to list the home on Zillow. By painting the issue in a sort of "us vs them" light, you're trying to create a conflict between real estate media companies and brokerages where none exists. Yes, Zillow makes money on advertising, just like newspapers do. But it's free to put your listings on Zillow, and we have buyers. Brokerages who don't help their agents and sellers market their homes where buyers are will see their listings business evaporate as more and more sellers become sophisticated about how to market their homes online. Respectfully, Spencer from Zillow spencer@zillow.com

 

Spenser, Curtis here from Sky Realty

 

I do not think your comments are rude. I feel you are not qualified to determine what decsions are good and bad with respect to our company and our clients.

Let me take this opportunity to clarify that we pulled our feed on the broker level. We let the agents do what their clients want. I will say that at each listing appointment that a seller brings up your name, I will send them a link to this blog and let them chose.

Ok Spenser you say "So please don't take this to be rude when I tell you, respectfully, that this is a very bad business decision for your company, your agents, and most of all your sellers. It is the responsibility of brokers and agents to make sure that their clients' listings are wherever buyers are looking"

I say the only context in which I have discussions about Zillow is how far off your valuation are from what we value our clients home. So I do not understand how it is a bad decision to keep my clients from your poor home evaluations. Why would my clients want their home on your site just to have buyers think that it is in no way worth what they are asking. You have no clue as to what is good for our business. I do not think subjecting my clients to your bad valuation is a bad business decision.

Spenser you say "In fact even in Austin, where we have notoriously bad public record data on Zillow, we have a ton of traffic."

I say that all you have is a great deal of traffic that is misinformed. Zillow has done absolutely nothing positive for any of the agents in my office, and that I can see for any of the REALTOR community in Austin.. In fact I had an agent come to me this morning in frustration that his buyer is questioning his valuation of a property based on the information that is coming from your site that has as you say "In fact even in Austin, where we have notoriously bad public record data on Zillow, we have a ton of traffic."

You see Spenser agents all over this town have had to battle "notoriously bad public record data on Zillow" just do their job. I see no evidence of how Zillow is making a genuine effort to work with the REALTOR community and be a positive productive partner in the business of selling real estate. I see more evidence of how you make my job harder. It is truly a shame to se all of your resources work so hard against us and our clients. "Free" is not a reason to put a listing on your site. You should encourage us to put listings on your site by offering something of value.

If your data is so bad and you know why do you offer it? 

Spenser you are no one to tell me that my clients should mixed their professionally valued listings with your "notoriously bad public record data on Zillow". I work to hard to have you mess it up. I think their listings are safer off of your site than on it.

If one of my clients tells me to list their home on Zillow after reading this then I will have a fiduciary duty to do so. I however, do not have a fiduciary duty to put their listing there with out knowing the consequences.It is not about "us vs them". It is about the fact that you have a great deal of resources and you use them to do more harm than good, at least in Austin. That "notoriously bad public record data on Zillow" causes a great deal of frustration in our market.

 

I think a bad business decision is to offer bad information to people who trust your site.

Why don't you put your valuable resources to work in a productive fashion?Spenser, I would like for you to take the comments to come back to your developers and work on something that actually brings value to the real estate buyers, sellers and agents that work so hard toward a successful transaction. Come back with something that works in a productive fashion and we can talk about doing business, we are not unreasonable.

 

This request is to all of you real estate agents. Please share all of your thoughts both good and bad about Zillow. Let’s try to determine whether Zillow has a more positive or negative impact on the Austin market.

 

Curtis Reddehase
REALTOR/President
Sky Realty


Lake Austin Real Estate

Austin Homes

Related Links
Blog Tags

7 Responses to "Talk With Zillow About Their Data in Austin"

Nicole Boynton wrote:
Here is a timeline of an experience I had with Zillow that left a sour taste in my mouth. 3/3/08 Home closed in MLS. I was listing agent. 4/18/08 Home still listed on Zillow. Received email from buyer (I was seller’s agent) with them asking me to remove it from Zillow. They believed I was affiliated with the site and had direct access to remove the listing. I signed up for Zillow account on this date so I could make a post to the site in attempt to have it removed. 4/18/08 Posted question to Zillow forum to remove listing because I could find no way to email the company directly after spending hours on the site trying to remedy the listing removal. 4/21/08 posted a second request to remove 10/3/08 Received comment to my posting that the home was no longer listed on website from another poster but was never contacted by anyone from Zillow through my post or email to this day.

Posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 12:00 AM.

Patsy Snyder wrote:
Spenser, as a real estate broker for about 18 years in my own company, it is obvious to me that you have no idea what a good business decision for any real estate brokerage company would be. First of all, we have a fiduciary to our clients and we work very diligently to honor that fiduciary and we do this by being accurate with our research and our advice to our clients. For too long now, I have spent too much time explaining to members of the pubic why their home is not valued correctly on Zillow. Then I have to spend some more time explaining to them that there is no way your information can possibly be correct here in Texas, a non-disclosure state, where deeds are recorded without the sales price. Only Realtors have this data that we originate through our local Board of Realtors and mls systems. So, after I have spent more time than I have to inform questioning members of the public as to why my information is correct and the information on Zillow cannot possibly be correct, only then can I get back to the business of working with clients and prospects. In my mind, those who wrote the business model for Zillow, should take a lesson from this experience and think about a new business that cannot be shot down with the truth. I have never, and never will, place my listings on your site because it is not difficult at all to show a client of mine that we really do not need to be on a site where there is "notoriously bad public record data" to quote you, Spenser. It will be even easier now, having your own personal admission of the bad public data that is transmitted by Zillow. I appreciate your honesty in this instance. I hope that by sharing my experience of all the wasted time I have had to spend to get my clients off of Zillow and back on the right track will help you to see that, with the launching of Zillow, you did not strike a gold mine. My clients are always grateful to learn the truth regarding the value of their home. I also hope that by sharing my experience as a business oriented real estate broker, you may see that it is never a bad decision to not be associated in any way with a company that knows its' data is wrong but continues with the deceit upon the public. This is know as "bottom feeding" and I am going to spread the word even more and this time, I have your very own words, "we have notoriously bad public record data." Spenser, maybe you should get up a little earlier in the morning and actually "know what you are talking about" before you challenge another Realtor about his/her ineptness in making business decisions". Thank you for your post of June 4, 2009. It allowed me to share my feelings of distaste toward Zillow for jumping in on the bottom of our profession and trying to feed your way to a legitimate business. To make matters worse, you state that "the best way to improve and marginalize an inaccurate Zestimate is to list the home on Zillow". Now, you want real estate professionals to improve your information and marginalize your inaccuracies by continuing to list our listings on Zillow. Unbelievable!

Posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 1:35 AM.

Gail Tassey wrote:
Zillow has also admitted they are not correct often in the Denver Market, it's a real eye opener to see the Zillow personel stepping up and admitting their inconsistancies: here is an exerpt from a blog post by Larry Holtz on June 10,2009 from REbarCamp in Denver. here is a link to the full post.. http://www.larryhotz.com/realtor-teach-in/ "I attended one session in which a representative from Zillow freely admitted that that his website’s estimates of a home value are only right 30% of the time in the Denver area. Still, Zillow operates an automatic valuation model which attempts to determine a home’s value through a computer program. But, the program can be notoriously inadequate and even produce dramatically distorted values. Zillow is looking to involve more Realtors in its website." A 30% valuation difference is HUGE, it mean a home that is actually priced and valued at $100,000 could be Zillowestimated at $130,000 or $70,000. If you are a buyer would you be confused by this discrepancies? Let's take that further and use the $200,000 home that is more common in our area of Austin Texas.. a 30% difference is $140,000 on the low side or $260,000 on the high side. Which side of this equasion would you want your buyer and seller on? Why does the public give Zillow so much credence? Publicity I would suppose... we need to publicize these facts of 30% fluctation in the Zestimates that are so freely given.

Posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 11:27 AM.

Laurie Roberts wrote:
My experiences with zestimates is that they are normally way off of what market value reality is. I have had many clients tell me that they saw a "zestimate" of their home and often I have to bring them back to reality with true market data. At least Spenser is willing to admit that the data for Austin on Zillow is notorious bad data.

Posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 10:17 AM.

Malita Jones wrote:
Zillow became fishy to me when I had three people call and ask about a house that was no longer on the market. Come to find out - it was pulling information from an outdated source. At that point I realized then that what Zillow was feeding the internet wasn't 100% accurate and that potential buyers are being mis led - yikes!!

Posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 10:19 AM.

Beverly Henson wrote:
This Zillow thing has been a mess in Austin ever since it started. I have had people tell me that they had done "their own research" for what to offer on a house. I had done a true CMA..with accurate data from Austin Board of Realtors...and they chose to go with their own research rather than mine because they truly thought they had the right information. NOT! And, of course, they lost the house. The next house we looked at was pretty much the same scenario BUT at least they would look at my numbers this time and compare them to what Zillow came up with. The buyer got really ticked off because he had believed Zillow was the real deal for facts in Austin..and it cost him his first offer because if it. It took forever to find him one to replace the one he had lost because of his figures that were so far off. You can bet that the next time that I come across this situation where Zillow is the "be all-end all" of facts, I will print Spenser's blog out and hand it to him. Obviously, Spenser wants us to put our stuff on there to give them more data..and then says we should do it because "it's free"...please...my fiduciary responsibility to my clients is worth more than that. But, these people are not realtors, they have no clue. It's all about their profit and not about our clients.

Posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 10:23 AM.

Laura "Ole" Olesen wrote:
I've just had two bad experiences with Trulia. One - a customer sent me a link to a property as their number one choice. It didn't look familiar to me in a neighborhood I know quite well. Turns out that was because it has closed a year earlier. Fortunately, I was able to get them on the Sky site for legitimate searching capabilities. Two - my listings are pulling up inaccurately on Trulia at the moment. It's very frustrating to have to track down all these sites and make sure they're accurately portraying our own content.

Posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 10:52 AM.


Leave a Comment

My Account

Log in, to view your saved searches and add to your favorite listings.

Sign Up Here For Your FREE Account

... So You Can:

  • View detailed property information
  • Print detailed property flyers
  • Save your searches & favorite homes
  • Inquiry about a private showing
  • Map individual property locations
  • Share your favorite homes with friends
Return to Top Email this Page Print This Page