Tag: Zolo

Zillow in Canada

Is there an equivalent to Zillow in Canada?

Zillow Group has become known for providing American Real Estate Searchers with a fast and easy to use, map-based real estate search platform. Along with their easy to use search platform, their website displays an abundance of property data, as well as their custom Zestimate™ feature which provides searchers with a quick and effortless way to research home prices. This allows Real Estate Consumers to do their own research by browsing real estate listings and sales data, prior to engaging with a professional of their choosing or with one of the Realtors® paying for Premiere Agent™ advertising space on Zillow’s platform. Is there currently a Zillow in Canada, or an equivalent that is trying to fill in the gaps?

To dive into whether there is a Zillow in Canada let’s first delve into Zillow’s monetization model. Their model is structured by collecting Premier Agent™ fees from REALTORS® paying to appear on listings within geographic regions of interest. This allows Premier Agents™ an opportunity to receive Buyer side leads on property listings that were supplied by another REALTOR®. With their acquisition of Mortgage Lenders of America, Zillow is also looking to collect orientation fees when they provide mortgage leads submitted through their platform to external lenders. These orientation fees may play into their home buying angle as well.

Update on Zillow in Canada

With regard to Zillow in Canada, the group recently made a move to display Canadian listings on their platform and they are in the process of adding more listings via alignments with Brokerages on this side of the border. The UX of the website is classic Zillow and very clean, but the listing inventory is low and the high-value data sets (sales data, Zestimate™ etc.) available stateside are not currently present.

Comparable Platforms to Zillow in Canada

In Canada, all the real estate boards feed their listings to the national website, Realtor.ca. Realtor.ca is operated by CREA, the Canadian Real Estate Association. This website has a national presence but is missing many of the features Zillow offers such as providing solid data and ease of use to search on their platform. Realtor.ca is typically referred to as clunky, dated and old.

On the surface level, DigiRealty.com would be the best Canadian listing provider with a similar user experience to Zillow. DigiRealty’s focus is to provide searchers with the most intuitive, fast and easy to use real estate search site. DigiRealty.com and Zillow also have similarities and differences in their monetization model. DigiRealty.com is operated by DigiRealty Technologies, which also owns and operates a wholly owned subsidiary real estate Brokerage. This entitles the company to monetize both commissions and advertising placements from aligned Agent Advertisers.

For readers that are unaware, here is a high-level overview of how some of these platform models are organized. Start off by viewing the sales channel as a funnel. Consumer traffic is in the top of the funnel (pageview etc.), consumer inquiries are in the middle of the funnel (leads, profiles and inquiries received by the Agent Advertiser), and a successful conversion/sale is at the bottom of the funnel (a closed deal). Obviously, the more deals that make it through the funnel, the more the platform can charge their Agent Advertisers for placements.

All things considered, Digirealty.com is likely the closest platform to Zillow in Canada

DigiRealty has an advanced map-based UX, fine-tuned advertising, placement and lead routing systems and a dynamic ‘go-to-market’ plan that will not be burdened by the bottlenecks that are existing for the established first movers. Where DigiRealty intends to excel, is always increasing the top of the funnel, along with focusing on reinventing the middle of the funnel activities centred around speed and thoughtful in market alignments. The already existing monster platforms know there is a problem with response speed and responder market knowledge alignment. Unless a multi-year revenue dip is okay with shareholders, they will be stuck with legacy premier placements and the associated downfalls.

DigiRealty believes that in-market, knowledgeable, lightning fast response speed and on-the-ground Agents will drive conversions. As a result of not having legacy booked revenue (that must stay on the books) from a potentially depleting premiere agent advertiser pool and a slow to response placement routing system that will bottleneck conversions DigiRealty is able to be more agile.

I wonder if the legacy, single player agent advertisers will leave platforms due to increases in response speed pressures that their small business cannot meet? If this is the case and we assume that qualified teams can nurture more middle to bottom of funnel leads to a conversion, will the resulting revenues offset the lost revenues? How does this transition look? It seems hard to imagine a case whereby a platform can service fast trigger teams and slow-moving placement agent advertisers at the same time. On a platform level, the teams likely provide better funnel to conversion movement, it will just be interesting to see how the shake back takes place.

In short, maybe the question should be, is there a Digirealty.com model in the states?

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Pain Points Faced by the Real Estate Industry

What are some of the biggest pain points and problems faced in the real estate industry today?

Some of my Coles notes on the biggest pain points and problems faced in the real estate industry today are as follows:

At current, real estate industry professional (Agents, Lawyers, Mortgage Brokers, Appraisers, etc…) make up the largest collective interest group attempting to monetize the economic derivatives of a given real estate transaction. The problem with this is that each of these independently self-interested professionals is also spending their marketing, advertising, and product development dollars in silos (to serve themselves/their individual businesses). The cumulative value of this independent spend would likely, if gathered in a collective, be multiple times greater than even the largest platforms development and operational expenditures.

The following statements combine to describe the industry’s largest pain points as I see them today:

  1. Fragmented industry professionals & digital spending: The largest interest groups spend in silos, which results in a product that is too small to fix industry challenges or to truly innovate.
  2. In the examples of unified spending we see today (at national associations/boards) the existing leadership groups have little to no foresight on how to spec, develop, monetize, deliver on and protect or grow digital products that will benefit their professionals; transactions, user search, compliance, etc… Unified spending on products that are innovating in this space is where these leadership groups should be concentrating to make an impact on the professionals they serve.
  3. Nimble digital groups are finding product-market fit by actually selling to their customers and needing to provide value to maintain their recurring revenue. Boards and associations are drowning in a cyclical pool of collect, misspend, collect, misspend, collect, misspend, compounded over years of this repetitive and unchallenged behaviour.

“On the other side of addressing the pain points of conventional industry, we must also open up the true/productive conversation – What does the industry look like in 2,3,5,10,20 years and what opportunities will emerge for forward thinking interest groups as a result. There are many… many… many products to look into. The serious groups are actually trying to organize while addressing the market, finding product market fit with future thinking professionals and building the bridge between industry and consumer”. – Jeff Mziray – CEO – DigiRealty Technologies

Side note, some of the large digital platforms/interfaces/media companies are lacking some on-the-ground-intelligence and practical application of process-based real estate knowledge that will be vital to providing a fulsome and innovative real estate technology product that will be able to scale with the industry.

The conventional industry has the opportunity to come together with technology to help shape the Real Estate industry of the future. However, if the industry does not ban together soon, we could be facing another industry disruption that will change the face of the real estate industry as we know it today… Think Blockbuster > Netflix, Think Taxi > Uber. Can industry conventional hit back? If yes, it will be fun to see what it looks like!

My two favourite search portals on the US side are Trulia and Zillow. My two favourite Canadian platforms are DigiRealtyTechnologies.com (biased built-in) and Zolo. As of October 14th Zillow has officially launched real estate listings in Canada on their .com. On first overview the site is operational but the sold and Zestimate features are not available and listing inventory is very low. I will keep an eye on this and update this article when/if the updates take place.

Jeff

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