Zillow

About Zillow

Zillow is the leading real estate and rental marketplace dedicated to empowering consumers with data, inspiration and knowledge around the place they call home, and connecting them with the best local professionals who can help.

They have the highest monthly traffic of any national listings portal and as a result, provide a large number of leads to agents willing to help those potential buyers find a home.

How Zillow Works

When home buyers search for homes online, Zillow often ranks as one of the top results on Google, which is why their traffic is so high. Below you can see they’re the first ‘organic’ search result after the ads:

In addition, they’ve become a household name in large part due to their TV commercials that air in many US markets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=60&v=eg9GArVJqrM

Once a potential home buyer lands on Zillow, they’re able to freely browse the listings on the site. They can save searches to get notifications, favorite homes they like, and then ultimately when they’re ready to see one of them, they can contact the agent:

When the consumer contacts the agent, that home buyer’s contact information is transferred over to the Zillow Premier Agent that has paid for placement on Zillow’s site so they can follow up and engage that client.

How to Maximize your Investment in Zillow Leads

Homebuyers that are searching through Zillow are mostly likely requesting showings of multiple different homes, and as a result, are being put into contact with multiple different agents. That means that follow up speed is absolutely critical.

It’s important to remember that while not every lead you get from Zillow will be ready to buy immediately, these leads are often very close to making a purchase decision, since they’ve already done a lot of research and ultimately landed on a few homes they’d like to go and see.

Zillow also provides an optional ‘Concierge’ program that will call your leads for you in order to ensure they’re getting a lightning-fast response, but many agents prefer to handle that in-house by calling themselves, hiring an inside sales agent whose role is to follow up with all their Internet leads, or outsource this to a separate 3rd party service.

Once you’ve decided on how you’re going to master the speed to lead piece, the second most important thing you need to manage is following up multiple times, consistently.

Many of these leads are submitting these requests at work or in other situations where they can’t take a call or respond right away, so it’s important to continue following up in order to connect with them.

People who follow up consistently will often see a 5x-6x better conversion rate than those who don’t.

How Zillow Integrates with Follow Up Boss

Follow Up Boss integrates directly with Zillow through their ‘Tech Connect’ program which means the leads show up in your Follow Up Boss the same instant they arrive in your Zillow Premier Agent dashboard.

Once the lead arrives in your account, we’re able to automatically distribute the leads based on the rules you set including via Zip Code, Price Point, MLS number, Round Robin or First to Claim.

We’re also able to send a personalized and automated text response to the leads as soon as they come in. This gets many of our customers a 50%-70% response rate on those leads:

Note: Zillow has started to experiment with making their concierge program mandatory in a few markets and only handing off the lead when they’re ready to connect with an agent for a showing. When they make the handoff, they’ll use the distribution rules set up in your Zillow Premier Agent dashboard to decide who to transfer the lead to. Whoever Zillow assigns it to, will be automatically reflected in your Follow Up Boss CRM for a seamless transition.

From there, we’ll continue to send a series of automated drip emails (which pause automatically if the lead replies to the text or any of those emails), and provide an advanced feature called Smart Lists to help you stay on top of all your subsequent follow ups in order to maximize your conversion rate.

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