This week Zillow Homes hit pause on their home purchasing/ iBuyer program. This article captures the granular information and what does this mean for me as a Realtor in Cincinnati?
Before we get into how this impacts my business, lets recap:
What Zillow has been doing from my Point of View:
- Started as a useful real estate searching app on mobile phones, less clunky than my Keller Williams consumer app.
- Created revenue by capturing leads off website and selling them to realtors.
- Grew with acquisitions to create a “one stop shop” for real estate transactions.
- Partnered with local agents and specific agencies to roll out an iBuyer program which makes offers to homeowners for overmarket prices and as-is condition.
- Just hit pause because they have too much inventory, October 2021.
From my Point of View, Zillow has not disrupted the markets within Cincinnati for several reasons.
- Cincinnati is a diverse market and not like other “Boom Towns” with miles of homogenous homes.
- Cincinnati is conservative and not typically an early adopter
- Cincinnati is very neighborhood specific and if youre expecting AI (artificial intelligence) or someone who isn’t local to understand “perceived versus physical” boundaries, youre going to miss out.
Why has the program failed or hit a major hurdle?
- The agents who are selling them are simply using the internet as a tool and they dont have the invested interest in advocating for their client.
- The sterile and corporate transaction is so void of emotion that people are not attracted to the model.
- The homes are overpriced.
- The contracts required are 28 pages which is 2.8x longer than our standard Cincinnati contract. Imagine the legal language…
- What started off as convenient/ easy; is now more difficult.
Agents who have paid thousands of dollars on Zillow for leads and advertising are in the business of transacting real estate. Those transactional focuses are stereotypically agents who lack quality or have teams which they can not support alone with database driven business.
What my focus will continue to be is nearly opposite of Zillows model. Personal, local data analysis, diverse high quality partners; like a title fight boxer Realtors are only as good as their last transaction and my service will beat the competition everytime to maintain my market relevance longer than a virtual disrupter.
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