We wondered what might happen when Zillow changed from a search portal to a brokerage last week.
Zillow showed us who’s the boss.
They deleted the last 50-100 sales from EVERY agent I checked, and ALL active listings were wiped off the agent profile.
They also tweaked my headshot!
None of my past sales on Zillow had any connection to the MLS – they were all manually uploaded, so this wasn’t a MLS-related event. So I guess Zillow deliberately removed the past sales and active listings!
They haven’t responded to requests as to why, or whether they will put them back.
The MLS-listed properties used to have the listing agent plus the three-headed combo of Premier Agents who were prominently featured in the right-hand column. The PAs pay hefty advertising fees for placement, but now they are listed below the schools which is down towards the bottom of the listing. They are called ‘personal guides’ now:
The listing agent does get a one-liner mention too.
Zillow demonstrated their killer instinct previously when they tried to squash Trulia by out-spending them on advertising. Then Zillow bought Trulia and made them a sidekick. Has anyone heard of Trulia lately?
The days of Zillow playing nice with agents are over.
Today’s realtors might survive as long as the baby boomers, who are the only people left who might remember – and appreciate – getting good help. After that, Zillow will declare that the cabal has been broken, and convince you that all you need is a transactional brokerage to handle your paperwork.
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Zillow’s likely response will be to blame it on the IDX:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Data_Exchange
Now that they are officially recognized as a brokerage, they have to play by the same rules as the rest of us and get their listings fed through the IDX. Any agent can have a search website, bit now that we have dominant portals it doesn’t do much good because consumers aren’t going to switch to timbuktwo search portal when they are used to their regular portals.
How we know that this isn’t a result of IDX rules?
Because they still have individual profiles on each agent, and they didn’t wipe out all past sales, just the last 50-100 to make us look bad over the last year. The remaining past sales are still there. It makes me look retired.
Natalie started inputting our past sales again. They would upload, then disappear.
It appears to be a very deliberate act.
Google never deletes data. Google often witholds data. Sounds like slander to me.
Well, this boomer wouldn’t think of buying a house without an agent “on the ground”. It isn’t like eating the cost of a web purchased coffee pot because the return postage or restocking fee was a wash with the purchase price. When you’re shelling out hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars, I think I want to see it, “touch it”, and know that the deal isn’t going to go south because of some disengaged remote control junior brokerage employees.
In our previous deals, you & Donna smoothed over several glitches that assured me it was well worth “getting good help” as you say.
When enough deals get jacked up by the ‘bots and rookies, the word will get out. It may take some painful (and costly) lessons for some buyers, but I suspect the one star reviews will leak out (even if they delete them). Keep an eye on Yelp! Maybe the first time buyer who clicks on a $70K condo in East Podunk will be happy, but when the stakes get higher, like the 2nd or 3rd move up house, we’ll see if that luck holds.
P.S. In their doctored photo of you, they cut off your tie. The good news is, as skinny vs. wide vs. skinny necktie fashions come and go, that will no longer be an issue! 🙂
Wow, big tech doing all kinds of stuff. Same thing happened on my page. I will call my useless association and the more useless NAR and let them know so they can do nothing. This needs to get out to all agents and everybody leave zillow and erase their page. I have an agent making a huge amount of money on Zillow leads. She pays about 3k a month. I aked her to reach out to her rep. Will let you know what they say. Thanks for letting us know Jim.
“Accurate and comprehensive data is central to our mission to simplify and streamline real estate transactions and deliver a more integrated experience to customers,” a spokesperson for Zillow said in a statement.
“Our Premier Agent and industry partners are a critical part of that vision: We believe moving to IDX will create a better experience on our platform for consumers, driving successful home searches for buyers, greater exposure for sellers, and creating more opportunity for our partners in the industry.”
The company’s switch to IDX means that listings and past sales are connected to an agent’s profile based on matching email addresses. In some cases, the email address the agent uses for Premier Agent was not matched because the MLS does not provide an email address with the listing.
The company was clear that the data has not been lost and is hoping to have past sales data restored by January 26. The company was also explicit that agent profiles — which include reviews and past sales — are not going away.
In a few markets, some Premier Agent customers are also seeing some inaccurate listing data and the company said it’s working with MLS partners to address those issues.