Zillow Acquires Postlets
Nothing like a bit of exciting news on an otherwise boring Monday to shake things up in the real estate industry.
It was announced today that Zillow (my former employer) acquired Postlets, a free syndicator of real estate listings. The company was founded by Asher Matsuda and Raymond Chen in 2005 and today boasts over 350,000 listings and 500,000 registered users (though not sure how many are active every month). Asher and I worked on a few initiatives during my biz dev days at Zillow and I was always impressed with him. I know Postlets was a part time thing for both Ray and Asher, so am happy to see their work pay off for them with a financial exit (though they are both now full time Zillow employees). I’m not going to write a novel, but I do have a few thoughts to share:
- I certainly agree with Brian that this is a counter strategic move to Move’s acquisition of Listhub a few months ago.
- That said, I still see a good relationship with ListHub as essential to both Zillow and ListHub. Zillow receives a large number of listings from ListHub and ListHub’s value is significantly lessoned to its partners if it were to stop sending listings to Zillow/Yahoo! Real Estate. So, this doesn’t mean Zillow is going to kick ListHub to the curb.
- While Zillow is not likely to stop cooperating with ListHub, you can of course expect them to try to direct agent and brokerage partners toward Postlets for syndication services rather than ListHub. Listings syndication is a must for any agent or brokerage that is focused on doing everything they can to sell their listings, and Zillow can now offer those services to its clients as a result of this acquisition. This acquisition takes them one step closer to being a one stop technology shop for agents and brokers.
- Believe it or not, I actually expect this to help Zillow more in the rentals area than in the for sale area. Without looking at the actual data, I think Postlets has a bigger inventory of rentals than homes on the market — and I bet the registered list of users includes a large number of property managers and landlords which Postlets can help Zillow reach. Brokers and agents already know Zillow, but Zillow has more work to do to reach landlords and renters.
- It’s interesting that Zillow acquired a company – to date, they’ve had a strong culture to build features internally, and I would say that’s worked pretty well so far. To me, the acquisition indicates they are ramping up for an IPO and need to have the strategic services at their disposal to counter any competitive questions about Move during the IPO process. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was another acquisition or two prior to their IPO…but I’ve been wrong before.
Will be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next year or so. With Move owning ListHub, Zillow owning Postlets, the question now becomes what will Trulia do? To compete for agent and broker ad dollars, it seems they are going to have to offer syndication to their partners as well. vFlyer maybe? Or Birdview Technologies?
Matt Dollinger
Posted at 21:39h, 11 AprilDrew – i think that this is pretty interesting and was kind of shocked as I really didn’t see what this brought to the table for the Big Z. It’s not like this has a killer reporting feature (like listhub) that Zillow desperately needs for it’s listings (to both agents AND Brokers). It’s a simple one site creator built on a glorified MCE editor… right?
However there are a couple things to think about.
1) Longtail SEO – this would essentially create hundreds of thousands of link backs to Zillow right? (I’m not an SEO expert but this is what it says to me)
2) Block “other” Syndication? – would they then block syndication out to other sites that Postlets currently pushes out to? Or would they be able to insert some kind of “Zillow Branding/Trackbacks” through the syndication to these other partners?
3) Rentals – YoooBecha… Killer
4) Kill Duplicates – i know that Zillow has been working hard to clean up their listing inventory in the past few months. They currently have a deal that until a postlet is taken down (or a broker informs them that t listing has gone “off market”) it will stay live on their site. This could help them with this in the future and help the overwriting of companies (like ours) that give them a very complex and data-rich XML feed.
Just a couple of thoughts to ponder my friend.
drewmeyers
Posted at 22:37h, 11 AprilYou know what they could do — hook Postlets to their own listing data
rather than making people enter it in manually. And offer Zillow clients the
chance to syndicate their listings with a single click. Maybe charge $25 or
$50 per month. And all of those links could go back to Zillow potentially.
Or maybe offer this for free to their current advertisers. Just talking out
loud.
And yes, they could easily gets a couple hundred thousand backlinsk from
Postlets, but those will be discounted since it’s a known fact (and hence
google knows) that Zillow owns the Postlets domain now.
Matt Dollinger
Posted at 23:26h, 11 Aprildude you’re too smart for me. I’m off to watch Jersey Shore. 🙂
M Squared Real Estate
Posted at 15:10h, 20 April1) Longtail SEO – this would essentially create hundreds of thousands of link backs to Zillow right? (I’m not an SEO expert but this is what it says to me).
I’m interested in the options they allow for the ‘More Information’ link that always appears on syndicated listings. With Listhub, this traffic is automatically directed to the listing on my website via a unique URL. If Postlets doesn’t offer this with their syndication and takes the user to a Postlets ad/landing page when clicked, then in my opinion this service is outdated at start. Hope they don’t make this mistake.
M Squared Real Estate
Posted at 15:10h, 20 April1) Longtail SEO – this would essentially create hundreds of thousands of link backs to Zillow right? (I’m not an SEO expert but this is what it says to me).
I’m interested in the options they allow for the ‘More Information’ link that always appears on syndicated listings. With Listhub, this traffic is automatically directed to the listing on my website via a unique URL. If Postlets doesn’t offer this with their syndication and takes the user to a Postlets ad/landing page when clicked, then in my opinion this service is outdated at start. Hope they don’t make this mistake.
edwin gerace
Posted at 23:58h, 11 AprilI think this will be interesting and yes I am shocked.
I do see some long tail advantages for this merger.
What I hope will not happen is that greed doesnt take over and prices go up to the agent. We are not in a economy where we need to burdon agents.
Realtor.com is a perfect example of this. The took advanatage of agents by pushing the fees from $399 to in some cases $1,000 per agent per year. They can not drive that much traffice much less that much sucess to make it worth that amount of money.
I believe that a merger is good. I hope the intent to to help the cause (realtors)
edwin gerace
Posted at 23:58h, 11 AprilI think this will be interesting and yes I am shocked.
I do see some long tail advantages for this merger.
What I hope will not happen is that greed doesnt take over and prices go up to the agent. We are not in a economy where we need to burdon agents.
Realtor.com is a perfect example of this. The took advanatage of agents by pushing the fees from $399 to in some cases $1,000 per agent per year. They can not drive that much traffice much less that much sucess to make it worth that amount of money.
I believe that a merger is good. I hope the intent to to help the cause (realtors)
edwin gerace
Posted at 23:58h, 11 AprilI think this will be interesting and yes I am shocked.
I do see some long tail advantages for this merger.
What I hope will not happen is that greed doesnt take over and prices go up to the agent. We are not in a economy where we need to burdon agents.
Realtor.com is a perfect example of this. The took advanatage of agents by pushing the fees from $399 to in some cases $1,000 per agent per year. They can not drive that much traffice much less that much sucess to make it worth that amount of money.
I believe that a merger is good. I hope the intent to to help the cause (realtors)
Sam DeBord, SeattleHome.com
Posted at 15:38h, 12 AprilSo, will Zillow turn off Postlets’ ability to syndicate to Trulia? I see some business sense in the move, but it’s still a bit murky.
Sam DeBord, SeattleHome.com
Posted at 15:38h, 12 AprilSo, will Zillow turn off Postlets’ ability to syndicate to Trulia? I see some business sense in the move, but it’s still a bit murky.
drewmeyers
Posted at 15:41h, 12 AprilNo. Postlets loses value if not sending to the largest sites.
drewmeyers
Posted at 15:41h, 12 AprilNo. Postlets loses value if not sending to the largest sites.
Sara Bonert
Posted at 00:42h, 13 AprilHey Drew – There certainly has been a lot of speculation about what this acquisition means for the industry. As you know, Zillow has partner with hundreds of MLSs and Brokers – some directly and some through companies like Listhub and Point2. We definitely value these relationships and both us and our users appreciate the high quality data they send.
John Evan Miller
Posted at 19:31h, 14 AprilI definitely didn’t expect Zillow to purchase Postlets at all–I’m rather shocked. I think you’re right in the fact that Trulia will more than likely have to do something to stay competitive. I guess we are all waiting to see how all of this pans out and whether it was a smart business move or not.
John Evan Miller
Posted at 19:31h, 14 AprilI definitely didn’t expect Zillow to purchase Postlets at all–I’m rather shocked. I think you’re right in the fact that Trulia will more than likely have to do something to stay competitive. I guess we are all waiting to see how all of this pans out and whether it was a smart business move or not.
Scott
Posted at 22:43h, 17 AprilMy comment on 1000 Watt. Interested in your thoughts:
Since ListHub syndication trumps Postlets, what is the advantage to this other than the registered user database?
Listing on Postlets:
http://www.postlets.com/repb/5411227
Same listing on Zillow (with no mention of the listing agent) provided by ListHub:
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5220-10th-Pl-S-Arlington-VA-22204/12095739_zpid/
(actually the agents name is on the page, at the very bottom)
drewmeyers
Posted at 18:33h, 21 AprilThat trump order is a single line of code that could easily be changed by Zillow if they wanted.
Scott
Posted at 19:02h, 21 AprilDo you think Keller Williams and Realogy along with numerous other large regionals would put up with that from Zillow? I know it is Zillow’s site to do what they want with, but they also have to keep the brokers and companies happy to, and these guys have dedicated ListHub feeds: http://listhub.coldwellbanker.com/network.html
drewmeyers
Posted at 19:12h, 21 AprilI didn’t say Zillow would do that. I’m saying they could if they wanted to.
Scott
Posted at 20:16h, 21 AprilI understand you did not say that, I was just pointing out that there are a lot of big players with vested interests (i.e. money) at stake with keeping things as they are on this front. Regardless, I hope that the guys at Postlets made out!! They deserve to and I hope their new positions at Zillow allow them to phone it in from the beach!!
Zillow Plays Nice with ListHub | | GeekEstate BlogGeekEstate Blog
Posted at 11:32h, 21 April[…] I believe this deal confirms my suspicion that the Postlets deal was just as much for the value they hold in the rentals vertical as it was […]
Dan
Posted at 12:38h, 02 Novemberhow do I stop my house being on Zillow…. type in my address & up comes all these sites with my listings… started with postlets… canceled them, but zillow is killing me with calls…..
Julie Montgomery
Posted at 14:43h, 16 AugustHi — does Postlets now also feed to trulia?