Zillow Adds 28 More Brokerage Partners for Preview as COO Explains Strategic Moat

A new group of 28 brokerages have signed on to offer Zillow Preview, bringing the total number of participating brokerages and franchisors to nearly 60.

Preview is Zillow's pre-market program, expanding visibility for sellers, agents and buyers before their property comes to market.

Zillow Preview listings are publicly visible on Zillow and Trulia, and buyers are never required to work with a specific brokerage to view or inquire about a home. Unlike private listing networks—where buyers have to work with one firm just to see what listings exist—Zillow Preview gives sellers the pre-market window they want with real buyer exposure from 235 million average monthly unique users.

Errol Samuelson, Chief Industry Development Officer at Zillow, said:

"Our research is clear: the best outcomes for sellers come from the broadest competition among buyers. Zillow Preview delivers exactly that—early visibility, early demand signals, early momentum—all while providing equal, unfettered access for buyers. That is what an open and transparent marketplace looks like. Pre-market listings belong in the daylight—giving sellers the broadest possible exposure and giving all buyers access without the requirement to get past a registration wall or work with one particular brokerage."

Properties listed via Zillow Preview receive elevated placement in search results and email alerts during the pre-market period, which builds buyer demand before go-live. Listing agents may earn a portion of the revenue Zillow earns when a deal closes through a Zillow Preferred Agent—paid by Zillow, at no cost to consumers or agents.

Several new partner brokers provided comments for Zillow's press release. Dave Ness, President of Thrive Real Estate Group, one of the latest brokerages to sign up, said:

"In today's confusing environment, Zillow Preview will bring much needed clarity and transparency to both buyers searching for homes—who deserve to see all available inventory—and sellers who deserve greater latitude to market their homes the way they deem most effective."

Mike Pappas, CEO of The Keyes Family of Companies, said:

"Our agents compete on expertise, relationships, and service, and this gives them another powerful tool to deliver maximum exposure on a marketplace where 70% of buyers already start their search. [Zillow Preview is] the kind of option our agents want to offer, and it's what sellers and buyers deserve."

Meanwhile, Jun Choo, COO at Zillow, says the company does not hide stock from consumers behind a registration wall, adding that Zillow does not use a bait-and-switch to lead consumers into working with partner agents, "because we're working with partner agents anyway."

Speaking on the Real Estate Insiders Podcast, Choo spoke extensively about the birth and purpose of Zillow Preview, saying that the company had been working on its version of a preview-listings for two years:

"Zillow Preview is [our] version of a coming soon or pre-market product. It is exclusive only during the preview period. It can't be on any other portal, it can only appear on Zillow and [the website of the broker] who owns the listing.

"[Preview] is a skinny listing, it is meant to create interest in the pre-market period. Preview by itself is an interesting product but really when you can fit it into a listing marketing strategy, it can solve a timing problem, it can solve a price discovery problem. It gives you options for sequencing how you will sell the home.

"If you're an agent, any leads that are generated in that preview period, we are giving the agent some economics on it. People may think they want 'My Listing, My Lead' (Costar/Homes.com) but the reality is we've built a system that converts those leads into revenue in the most efficient way possible through our Preferred program.

"Preview listings have two ways that consumers can contact the agent. One, they can contact the listing agent [and the lead goes to them]. But if they want to schedule a visit of the home, that goes into our Preferred program... and make sure that the best agents are converting those leads at the highest rate possible, and if a transaction happens, ten per cent of the gross commission goes to the listing agent who brought the listing to us. In no scenario are we charging the listing agent for this Preview. We're creating incremental leads for our Preferred program through exclusive content and we're allowing the listing agent to participate in some of the economics, and we're maintaining transparency for buyers.

"Other than the fact that it happens before the MLS active period, there are almost no similarities with other 'Coming Soon' products. Maybe sellers need more choices on how they want to market their home, which is fair, but we don't want a product out there that does this at the expense of the buyer experience, so we built a version that helps buyers and helps sellers and helps listing agents. We're not backtracking on any of our philosophy.

"People may be surprised at how quickly we got [Preview]. There's no way we did that from a standing start in a month. We've been thinking about it. What happened quickly was the conversations with the brokers and how we went to market with it. That was a bit of a scramble. But the Product team had actually been thinking about this from the time we announced Zillow Showcase two years ago. We wanted more options for sellers. One of the options we thought about was a 'pre-market, 'coming soon' type of option.

"Showcase was the more compelling product in terms of the rich media and being a better experience for buyers, and it is a listing that is active in the marketplace. High resolution photos, interactive floorplans, a 3D home tour, and we boost it in our rankings so it gets more exposure, [getting around] twice the number of impressions and clicks than a regular listing.

"We listened to the marketplace and the more we heard, that this pre-market was a thing that agents wanted, that agents were competing for with sellers, that we needed a version of it. We started from, 'if this product is going to exist out there, we want the version that Zillow is okay with' because we want the version that is going to be consumer friendly, that buyers are still going to have a good experience.

"There are versions of pre-marketing that puts things behind registration walls and get rid of transparency and get rid of cooperation. All those things in our estimation are bad. But if you want a trailer for a movie, let's make it something that is going to work with MLSs, work within whatever rules are out there in the market, and eventually flips to getting the broadest exposure possible. Our job is to help the seller, whatever the rules are. As long as we can continue to build and innovate, we're happy to comply with a complex set of rules. We can't start building with rules in mind. We're going to try and find some way for consumers to have a place to go where they can find all the listings."