I just saw the news that Zillow Group acquired Naked Apartments for $13 million in cash. Zillow is definitely investing heavily in rentals. Current renters are tomorrow’s buyers, and they obviously realize it’s cheaper to acquire that traffic ahead of the pack rather than compete for it when they…

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been thinking about WordPress a bit recently, having spent time re-launching Local Market Explorer and looking into agent review plugins. I can’t help but notice the fact that the largest real estate technology player, Zillow, doesn’t seem to be aggressively…

One of the opportunities I’ve written about is showcasing true local experts in a compelling way. That’s why I find StreetAdvisor a compelling project; they are in a great position to swing at this, and have the right brand name for it. Real estate and travel are the…

My company, Virgent Realty, sold a home in Atlanta’s hot Grant Park neighborhood just under three months ago for $492,500. The home had numerous showings its first weekend, and went under contract 5 days after we put it on the market. This morning, I was…

You should all go read Rob Hahn’s latest post: The Future of Real Estate, According to Zillow. It’s a topic the industry — and specifically brokerages/franchises/MLS’ who make money from headcount based business models — should think deeply about.  

This isn’t really news anymore (I meant to finish this post earlier this week), but wanted to call attention to the fact that Zillow Mortgage Marketplace recorded over $10M in revenue this past quarter (see press release here). I’ve long thought mortgages was the massive sleeper component of…

Zillow is acquiring DotLoop. Fires are burning in real estate social media. Let’s get this out of the way. There are tons of brokers and agents who dislike Zillow. Call them what you want. They’re here. I’m a regular critic of the company when they (regularly) make…

Zillow Group is making another acquisition: Dotloop (read press release). +   Zillow seems to buy up every innovative technology player in the entire industry. I can’t fault them for buying up the talent, and mindshare. I have to wonder if any technology companies are going to be left as independents…

Project Upstream, as far as I can tell, is all about consolidating the MLS data. Zillow currently has to take data from hundreds of MLS organizations, in a variety of formats, and consolidate it to put it on Zillow. Once Upstream is completed, they will…

Once again, Zillow nails it with their latest ad…