Think of your marketplace as your playing field, not unlike an athlete views a football field, basketball court, or hockey rink. The better you know every inch of that playing field, the more you can exploit it to your advantage.
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Acquiring Knowledge about Your Marketplace
Word leaked that #1 Real Estate Blog Curbed.com is getting into the listings game a couple of weeks ago. As of today, the new service is live in Manhattan.
Curbed’s new Marketplace lets Realtors and brokers list their properties inside a traditional classifieds-type environment. For 99 bucks you’ll be able to reach out to some of Curbed’s 300,000 loyal readers.
The price is right, but it remains to be seen whether those readers will take the leap and move beyond their RSS readers to dig for listings inside the Marketplace.
More interesting however, is what Curbed is calling its QuickListings - which are advertorial-type property listings that are inserted into Curbed’s blow flow. Call them Sponsored Posts, but since Curbed generally treats listings as content anyway, this approach does not seem so incongruous.
The more I think about it, I like this approach a lot. As a broker or agent, your listing gets top billing and placement rather than being buried in the back pages. As the publisher, Curbed has already warmed its readers to receiving information they may be interested in. Readers will appreciate the clear deliniation between the editorial and advertising but may also appreciate the relevance of the content.
Newspapers, especially those who still have local real estate sections, would be wise to watch was Curbed is doing. It’s to these sorts of ideas that those fleeing advertising dollars will be going.
The only question I would have as a marketer is what sort of analytics are baked into the Marketplace and QuickListings - can I get reports how many times my item was viewed, what the CTR (click-thru rates) were? Even a geographic breakdowns of who was viewing my listing from where? Having that sort of information would make this product a home-run.
Coincidentally, Trulia launched a blogging platform last week, which makes for the very odd situation where you have a real estate blog is getting in to the property listings game and a propety listings portal getting into the real estate blogging game. Worlds are starting to collide here.
Will we soon be seeing featured listings inside Trulia Voices too?
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Curbed Quicklistings Puts Listings in Blog Flow
In this crazy market, how are you supposed to keep up with — and help others keep up with — the latest mortgage rates? Well, now you don’t have to worry about it. We did the work for you — Zillow has created new mortgage rate widgets you can add to your own Web site or blog (for free) to track the latest rates. Plus, the widgets include free co-branding on our site (free advertising for you!), and they come in a variety of flavors.
The rate widgets are cool, interactive mini-graphs that show up-to-the-minute rates submitted to Zillow Mortgage Marketplace and are the only “live” rate widgets on the Web! Rates are computed from real quotes borrowers receive from lenders just seconds before the chart was created. The widget shows rate trends from the previous day, week, month, and 3 months for various loan programs, as well quote volumes for each rate. Click on the date buttons to see the graph dynamically update.
We also have more traditional tables with the last day’s rates and their change from the previous week. Visit our mortgage widgets page to learn more and get your own rate widgets for your website. There are a couple blogs that have already integrated the rate widgets worth taking a look at — Diane Cohn’s Reno Realty Blog and Adam Golden’s TriValleyVine.
We hope you enjoy these new widgets and find them useful. We are very excited to offer this data to our users for free as well as site co-branding. As always, let us know if there are other widgets you would be interested in seeing.
Enjoy!
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Get Free Mortgage Rate Widgets and Co-branding
Today, Zillow Mortgage Marketplace reached a couple of impressive milestones: more than 50,000 loan requests have been submitted, and more than 3,000 lenders responded to those requests with 250,000 loan quotes. All of this activity has taken place since the product’s launch on April 3 — just three months ago!
In addition to the previous feedback we received from borrowers, our site metrics tell us that on average, borrowers wait only 18 minutes to receive their first quote from lenders, and each loan request receives 8 quotes. Some requests are even receiving more than 30 loan quotes! Here is what some borrowers have to say about Zillow Mortgage Marketplace:
Not only is Zillow Mortgage Marketplace helping borrowers, but it is also working for lenders. According to a recent survey among confirmed lenders, two-thirds of lenders have been contacted by at least one borrower. Lenders stated that the greatest benefits of Zillow Mortgage Marketplace are the ability to get free, unlimited leads, and the ability to get quality leads. These benefits, combined with the effectiveness they’ve seen so far, resulted in lenders rating Zillow Mortgage Marketplace 32% higher than Bankrate and 18% higher than LendingTree in terms of overall satisfaction. Here are some quotes from happy lenders:
If you’re looking for a loan, it takes minutes to fill out the form and there is no obligation, no personal information revealed and no one will call you until you initiate contact. If you’re a lender, it’s pretty easy to see that you can fish all day for free. And yes, the bites and catches are coming.
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Zillow Mortgage Marketplace Milestones
