Zillow Leads the Social Networking Charge on the Real Estate Market
I’m not sure quite when it happened, but at some point in my life the typical cycle of conversations that I tend to hear in social settings shifted from movies, sports, and the pursuit of the opposite sex to work, family, and the real estate market.
As the popularity of social networking websites continues to expand from kids looking to decorate their online profile, flirt, and make friends to niche interests that appeal to more mature audiences (LinkedIn is winning in the business networking space, for instance) it’s a no brainer that real estate will be a highly sought after territory.
Real estate site Zillow has just unveiled “community Web pages for more than 6,500 neighborhoods in 130 U.S. cities” according to John Cook’s Venture Blog. People will be able to add media to personal profiles and presumably interact with others in the neighborhood.
I suspect that home owners who have no interest in MySpace may be extremely tempted to be lured into social networking through web communities based around local community and real estate prices and sales. Zillow, which already does a pretty great job of showing satellite imagery with street names and home sale prices graphics laid on top, is in an ideal position to gain significant share of the market here.
With so many social networking sites competing for audience, it’s smart to base new ventures in already established web services. People already interested in Zillow may well become long time users because of the added social networking features, which may in turn lure new users into the fold as well. The recently folded Backfence – which tried to tap into local communities as well – did not have the same leverage to build membership.
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July 11th, 2007 at 10:41 am
[...] Eric Berlin posts “Zillow Leads the Social Networking Charge on the Real Estate Market“ [...]
July 11th, 2007 at 11:39 am
[...] Â More: John Cook’s Venture Blog, Drew Meyers, Zillow Blog, The Real Estate Bloggers, Realivent, VC Ratings, Online Media Cultist. [...]
July 11th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
[...] connections, but turning that connection into user-facing value is going to be hard. Nevertheless, OMC thinks Zillow may have something. Share This Sphere: Related ContentIf you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS [...]
July 11th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Thanks for the link love, y’all !
July 12th, 2007 at 12:16 am
StreetAdvisor.com is a new site that caters to anyone searching for the perfect street to live. It’s an online community to share and read reviews of what it like to live somewhere – right down to the street level.
Featured on CNN, the LA Times, and TechCrunch, StreetAdvisor is the essential guidebook to finding the right street, written by the people who have lived there, through words, pictures and video.
We need your help. In order to meet our goal of including every street in the U.S., we invite you to join online and write a review of a street where you live now, and if you’re up for it, where you used to live. Go outside. Take some pictures. Upload them to your street. Help us help those who want to know what it’s really like to live there.
Just go to http://www.streetadvisor.com and create a free account. Then go ahead and enter your street and start writing. Upload pics of your street and also click on the guidebook tab to offer additional insight that you may want to share about your neighborhood with your existing and future neighbors.
If you have any questions, please contact me at karyn [at] future-works [dot] com
It’s time to let the world know what you REALLY think about your street!
Thank you for your support,
The StreetAdvisor Team.
July 12th, 2007 at 2:04 am
Thanks for the tip, Adriana!
July 12th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
[...] John Cook at Seattle PI thinks it could even lead to e-commerce possibilities, and Eric Berlin also sees some potential [...]
July 14th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
All of these people are beating me to the punch with interent site ideas. Basically if its any type of worthwhile information, it nees an interactive website,
and I mean any type.
Here’s one, easily understood accesses to state and federal laws. Ironically, that may be legally hard to do.
Travis
July 19th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Real estate is certainly a popular topic to talk about. It will be interesting to see if Zillow’s figured out a formula for enabling this type of conversation.
July 20th, 2007 at 1:09 am
Travis - I would love to see that site, think it could be very successful!
Ed - Totally agreed. Some company will probably crack the code on doing local news and social networking. I’m not sure that it will be Zillow, but it will be an interesting experiment to watch.
July 20th, 2007 at 1:23 am
yeah for some reason, the powers that be want us totally ignorant of the law. The internet could blow the doors wide open
July 23rd, 2007 at 6:15 am
[...] Zillow Leads the Social Networking Charge on the Real Estate Market [...]
April 11th, 2008 at 10:16 am
check it out here…
42. 15. 08….
August 22nd, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Zillow has a great shot at making this work for them. Unlike the other companies who went local just focusing on news, Zillow can offer services to many other small businesses that will jump at the chance (obviously real estate agents) to partner with Zillow in their hometown.
October 13th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
It will be interesting to see how Zillow holds us in this fierce economic downturn we’re going through. If they can stay the course they may be ok, but housing centric businesses are in trouble.