Many agents that I talk to just LOVE to HATE Zillow. When I question them about this I usually hear about inaccurate Zestimates® that their clients use to value their homes.
Others rail on about Zillow selling leads back to them that Zillow gets because they advertise the agent’s listings. And I have heard some other weird complaints that I won’t go into here. I’ll just leave it at this. Many agents just don’t like Zillow.
Fair enough, I get it. But, I think a more rational approach to Zillow might be to figure out how you could use it to benefit you. As it turns out, Zillow offers you a free profile that can show case you, your active listings, your past sales and reviews form clients. Did I mention that this was free?
Since Zillow acquired Trulia recently, they have merged the agent profiles, This means that once you create a profile on Zillow, it gets replicated to Trulia. Now you are on both sites and haven’t paid a dime! And, you only have to go to one place to manage both sites profiles.
But maybe the biggest benefit that Zillow offers you for FREE are Zillow Widgets. What the heck are Zillow Widgets you might ask? They are miniature software snippets that you can add to your website or blog to display various bits of info gleaned from Zillow, like your listings, past sales and your reviews. And much more.
Go here to see a list of what’s available: http://www.zillow.com/webtools/widgets/
If you are tech savvy enough to install them yourself, great. If you need a little help, they have a set of instructions here for some popular web platforms: http://www.zillow.com/wikipages/Zillow-Widget-Tips/
Failing that, direct your web professional to the widgets page so that they can set them up for you.
It may be fashionable to bash Zillow, but the truly smart agent will learn how to put Zillow to work … for free.
