Your Market Doesn't Care If You Hate Zillow
It’s time to get over the Zillow craze.
Zillow is a website. Zillow is not the devil. Zillow is not going away.
Why?
Because it provides the market with information that is not readily available to them in another format from the comfort of their own home.
That’s called good business.
But if you read many of the real estate boards, blogs and mailing lists, you would think the big Zillow monster was coming to steal food out of the mouths of agents’ children.
Some folks in the real estate world even go so far as to refer to the evil entity only as “Z,” for fear that saying the name will give it undue publicity.
A lot of blogs are comparing Zillow to the travel giant Expedia and talking about “what they did” to the travel agent industry.
I would argue that Expedia didn’t do a thing except provide a better product to consumers.
And consumers took them up on the offer.
Travel agents were free to change their business to compete, but they didn’t.
In business, the recipe for success is to live in a reality-based world. That means you don’t go around believing things are a way other than how they are, you don’t go around wishing things were different…
Reality-based living is when you actually see things as they really are and make your decisions accordingly.
The only thing for sure is that the real estate business is changing. All business is changing – that’s the point… that’s what makes the game worth playing.
The winners embrace the change and figure out how to leverage it. The losers don’t.
So in the reality based world, we know two things when it comes to Zillow:
- Zillow is providing value to the consumer or they wouldn’t be using it. Whether or not the figures are “correct” is a matter of the perception of the user.
- The real estate professional does not get a vote on whether or not the consumer should or will use Zillow.
So you basically have two choices:
1. Complain – chance of profiting from complaining = 0%
2. Learn to use Zillow to your advantage – chance of profiting = 100%
It reminds me of my former life as a musician. I majored in pipe organ performance at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester New York.
On one hand, it is one of the best places in the world to get a music education. The downside is that it is also very easy to get caught up in your own world and lose touch with reality.
I remember when I would actually turn my nose up at the organists who performed the music of Bach with an “out of date” edition of the music.
Now that I look back, the funny thing was, the audience (my market that I was ignoring) didn’t seem to care either way. They weren’t in a position to know the difference and they weren’t interested in the difference.
They weren’t interested in being “right,” they just wanted a nice evening at the concert.
And so it goes with Zillow. The smart thing is to stop complaining about it and to start using it and learning from it. Because that is what parts of your market are doing.
There is one thing I know… If you think Zillow is “bad” for the real estate industry, just wait… because there is a whole lot more change on the way.
Hold on… here we go.
And go spend some time at www.zillow.com. You’ll find your market hanging out there :)
