The Web Real Estate Wars Escalate

By now everyone within the real estate industry is aware of the bomb that Zillow dropped yesterday, allowing sales listings on their site – by anyone. Not exactly what you want to hear if you’re an AVM-based competitor, and we are one. If you’re a listing service like Realtor.com or Homes.com you’re not to happy about the fact that Zillow just trained its guns on you. If you’re an aggregator of home sales info like Trulia or Propsmart, you’re even less happy.

You can read the news and analysis of what people in the industry think on this. I would suggest that Greg at Bloodhound Blog be your first stop. Then, take the minute to read Kevin’s take at 3 Oceans and Ardell at Rain City Guide.

Since we’re one of the only direct competitors to Zillow, the others being RealEstateABC and CyberHomes, and since we’re the only ones with a blog – here are my thoughts.

On December 5, a lot of people thought that there were two different sides to the real estate game online – each fighting different battles. There were the listing services and aggregators, and then there were the AVMs. The listing services and aggregators thought they were fighting their own little battle, and didn’t realize that the AVMs had the capability to enter the same fray. Amazon, Yahoo, Google and eBay have all already shown that DATA is the key – how did everyone not realize this is the same in real estate? (for more on this, read #3 by O’Reilly)

December 6 opened up a whole new world, where the listing services are at odds with the biggest of the AVMs and the aggregators find themselves out of the game. The ultimate prize for the winner is being seen as the place to go for all real estate information – some would call that a national MLS.

This brings up an interesting set of questions. Is this a zero-sum game, or is there room for competitors? Are we looking at a search-war model (ex: Google vs Yahoo), where there are competitors, but one has significant mindshare and marketshare?

I believe that consumers will always go to multiple sources to find information. In my last post I talked about Edgeio and where the eyeballs are for real estate listings. Craigslist is still important, eBay plays a small role, and Google will make a play before this is all said and done.

Basically, let’s not make the same mistake as the first time, where we thought it was just listing services and aggregators. This time it’s not just about listing services and AVMs within the real estate world, it’s also about the “Big” web players that have a lot of money and are well versed in building tools for their users. Zillow might look big to us within the real estate world, but in the grand scheme of things across the web, they are only a medium-sized animal.

How about eppraisal.com? We’re still in the game. Zillow is the 900 lbs gorilla among public AVMs, but we’ve always positioned ourselves as the tool for real estate professionals. We’re committed to making our tool better, and there are some big changes coming from us over the next couple months as well. Look for differentiation among the AVMs – we’re the small company here, but we have some great ideas that we think will rock Zillow a bit too.

Now, excuse me while I go read my dog-eared copy of The Art of War again.