"Zillow Is Buying And Selling Lots Of Homes; It's Almost Half Its Business"9943

Originally Posted by cnitschke1
I was on a conference call on Monday with a number of Real Estate CEOs including Shawn Black, the CEO of Knock.com and also a former founder of Trulia and his opinion was that the iBuyer category would represent about 50% of the market in the next 5 to 10 years. The rest of the group had a more conservative outlook with a target that was closer to 20% of the market.

The thing you have to keep in mind about the Zillow iBuyer program is that currently they are only converting about 1% of their offers in purchases and that the rest of the program is being converted into seller leads for the premiere agents.

Having just gotten back from Inman and having met with all 3 of the major players in real estate VR, Matterport, Ricoh and Zillow (Which appears to be a white label implementation of Ricoh) each of the products has its place and each of the vendors has its own challenge.

Zillow/Trulia has the clear advantage as their 3d tour program is 100% integrated into their platform and Zillow owns the real estate consumer by a significant margin vs the number 2 competitor, Realtor.com

Matterport says that they have about 10% of the market, but according to my survey of pulling data from their syndication partner, realtor.com, they are only capturing 1% to 5% of the consumer facing side in any given market. This has a to to do with a reliance on the virtual tour link to power the Realtor.com integration and the fact that many MLSs use that slot for other forms of media and a general lack of syndication knowledge on the part of either MSPs or the agents themselves. If the tours do not reach the consumer then they don't exist.

Zillow however made the assumption that the agent would be shooting their own Zillow 3d Tours with inexpensive Ricoh cameras and even now they are understanding that this may have been a massive mis-step. So much so that they pulled the search by 3d Tour function from the beta program when the program went live nationally because there are so few tours. Zillow has realized that they need a shooter network so there is a tremendous potential for business in leveraging Zillow 3d Tours as an onramp to further relationships with agents/offices for other products like photography, drone work, video and even Matterport.

Ricoh is the odd one out. They too are directly targeting agents but they have no syndication partners so at best they are just another virtual tour that then has to be embedded into someone else's platform. But at $45 per moth for all you can eat tours, vs Zillow's completely vertical and proprietary platform and Matterport's premium product, but at a premium price, Ricoh does have an interesting offer.

Personally I deploy all 3 platforms for my 900 or so agents.

1. Matterport - Because tours can be downloaded for offline viewing, the pro2 produces the highest quality tour, when used on a touch device the tour is very natural for the consumer and the tours have direct integration with Realtor.com

2. Zillow - No additional hosting fees, very quick shoots, they are embedded in Zillow and currently I have Zero competition for Zillow tours so my agents can leverage Zillow which the seller understands plus the tour that no one else is offering and win listings.

3. Ricoh Tours - This is a cost effective way for me to shoot and maintain reusable community content in VR to enhance my hyper local marketing campaigns.

I don't think there has ever been a better time to be involved in Real Estate content creation for those that know how to present the topic and are open to change since this space and business models are going to start evolving at a nearly vertical rate.