Zillow Launches Hot or Not for Real Estate
I’m going to disagree with Dustin (see Zillow gives us some remodeling porn), Zillow’s new Dueling Digs game isn’t that much fun.
But I suspect I’m not the target market for this sort of game. Online real estate is strictly a utilitarian activity for me (wow, the presbyterian Scot in me really comes out with that sentence).
I use the tools of Real Estate 2.0 to evaluate the market and to help me find a new home to live in. I don’t really go for the whole real estate porn thing — I get my kicks in other ways…
(Motorcycles and snowboarding, people - keep your minds out of the gutter.)
But Zillow definitely seems to be angling for that market (the real estate obsessed) though. So I guess if you we’re to boil down each of the Big 3 Real Estate 2.0 search sites’ audiences to their core, you’ve got:
- Zillow - For the Real estate porn junkies
- Trulia - For the Real estate search nerds
- Frontdoor - umm… for people who watch HGTV?
While I tease them all a bit, I do think that’s pretty close assessment. Correct me if I’m wrong, by all means.
And I do think Dueling Digs is a smart move for Zillow. It’s a very savvy commercial move since it gives them some additional unique sponsorship opportunities by leveraging a pretty deep asset (their listing photos) that otherwise adds little to the bottom line.
I noticed for example, John Deere was sponsoring the yards section. One could easily see a brand like Behr sponsoring the living spaces section or Kohler sponsoring the bathrooms section too.
But more than just an ad play, they’ve also added some interesting community angles to it too where the votes are all tallied together to see which is the most popular bedroom or bathroom. From Zillow® Blog:
Your votes are then tallied with other players’ so you can also see what the Zillow community likes the most — which kitchens are most popular, for example. We have millions of home photos on Zillow and users are adding even more every day, so you can expect to stumble upon new pictures — and new inspiration for your own home - each time you play.
(How’s that for bragging rights - I have the most popular bathroom in America!)
It sounds like Zillow knows their user base and knows what they want. And while the game doesn’t do much for me, I do think they will find an audience for this.
The good news for Zillow too is that that audience does seem to be growing. Despite a period of relatively flat growth, they’ve seen a recent uptick (according to Compete anyway). Interestingly, at the same time, Trulia’s recent fast climb seems to have stalled.
For more on online real estate games, read Realius Lets the Games Begin.
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9 Comment(s)
2 Trackback(s)
- From The Real Estate Coach : People Want to Just Search for Real Estate! | Mar 21, 2008
- From People Want to Just Search for Real Estate! « Therealestatecoach’s Weblog | Mar 28, 2008
Pete Flint from Trulia.com | Mar 20, 2008 | Reply
Hi Joel,
Trulia’s traffic has not stalled. We grew from Jan to Feb according to our internal data and also according to comScore.
Also, March growth looks really strong according to our internal numbers.
This graph from compete shows a more up to date estimate of the relative traffic growth.
http://tinyurl.com/26be95
Of course take all these numbers with lots and lots of caution, all the companies here would say they significantly under report the US traffic.
Trulia does around 4m unique users a month and is by far the fastest growing of any of the larger sites.
Pete
Joe Manausa | Mar 20, 2008 | Reply
Joel,
Tons of great content. I could spend a career here.
Thanks.
Overland Park Real Estate | Mar 20, 2008 | Reply
I am with you Joel, I would not be their target audience(even a non real estate industry version of myself). I dont see the apppeal in voting which yard or living room I think looks better…I am amazed that there is a large demographic that does.
Michael Pierce
Spencer | Mar 21, 2008 | Reply
Hi Joel,
Thanks for the post about Dueling Digs. Personally, I love the feature. It’s helping me plan a remodel as we speak — giving me design ideas and helping me figure out what I like.
Re Z-traffic, I have to agree with Pete that these traffic monitoring sites are rarely accurate. Zillow is now over *5* million uniques per month (per our internal Omniture data), a lot higher than the ~2M that Compete shows in the chart you included. Compete did get our recent uptick right though — we’ve seen stellar traffic growth the last few months.
Real Estate Guru | Mar 21, 2008 | Reply
Another really great website that deals with California and now the east coast is http://www.movoto.com. I used it to find a local agent that was really helpful in finding me a home in San Jose. I highly recommend it!
http://www.movoto.com
Provo | Mar 21, 2008 | Reply
That’s funny. I used to spend hours on the original “hot or not” website. I guess this one’s not quite as vain.
Louis Cammarosano From Homegain | Mar 22, 2008 | Reply
Have to agree with Spencer and Pete, the traffic numbers on on Comscore, alexa (the most off), compete, quantcast are not even close to correct.
Some months when our traffic goes up they show a decline and vice versa. And of course they alway undercount.
The metric we track the most closely is not volume of visitors but our revenue per visit -which has been rising steadily for the last two years
Chuck | Mar 24, 2008 | Reply
I applaud Zillow for providing consumers with a game to engage with real world content. Games are useful tools. They are used throughout our educational process and they are a common part of media (eg. crossword puzzles, NCAA March Madness Pools, etc).
We are building a series of games that use real world content that brokerages and portals can embed into their websites. If you wish to have engaging content for your site and your user base, drop us a note at info@realius.com.
George | Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
It’s working. It provides a fun feature that users like. It’s innovation like this that make Zillow successful.