Zillow’s data aggregation prowess has pushed its chief economist into a new position as a member of the federal government’s open data advisory council. Stan Humphries will take a position as an advisor on the Department of Commerce’s panel intended to help government make better…

Zillow is in negotiations with MRIS to establish a direct data feed of broker listings ahead of the looming cancellation of Zillow’s ListHub syndication contract. “It is the sole prerogative of the Listing Broker to decide where their inventory appears,” said Jon Coile, MRIS Chairman…

Placester took a shot at Zillow by slashing their agent website prices [Via Realuoso]. From their CEO Matt Barba… If having a great website is a given, then affording a great website should be too. We strongly believe this is what it should cost to…

Crunchbase posted an article today covering the hot investing activity surrounding RE tech. One of the quotes in the post could probably be found in just about every story that has been written on the subject since 1998 or so. “Real estate is a super attractive…

Realtor.com shut down AgentMatch – There was literal outrage from the industry when it launched about a month ago. More on the shutdown here. Regardless of what agents think, I think some iteration of this will exist at some point in the future. Whether it’s Zillow, Trulia,…

A drop dead simple way to ask real estate questions, and get responses from real estate experts. In an app. On Zillow’s iOS app — there is no way to ask questions in Zillow Advice. Maybe they should just package that experience into a separate…

Zillow is kicking off a new TV campaign… What do you think?

I was just talking shop with Greg Fischer tonight, and we got to discussing recent real estate industry acquisitions. How did I miss the fact that CoreLogic bought Case-Shiller from Fiserv for….$6 MILLION? That’s it? WTF? Why on earth did Trulia not buy that brand? Case-Shiller…

Home Improvement is a huge category, $300 billion big. When you combine the retail products and myriad service providers together you have vertical that makes up a respectable chunk of the U.S. consumer economy. When it comes to the web and the creativity of this…

Wow, the Zillow M&A department ha been busy. Today, they announced the acquisition of HotPads — for $16 million in cash. Zillow has purchased Buyfolio, Mortech, and RentJuice within the past year. The acquisition of HotPads gives them another 2.8 million uniques per month, most of whom are…