Zillow chooses Atlanta for southern regional hub

E-commerce is picking up in the American South. Zillow has confirmed that it's looking to bring its real estate marketplace to establish a regional headquarters for the company in the South, specifically placing a hub for its Zillow Offers division in Atlanta, Georgia.

Zillow Offers is a relatively new service for the real estate tech company. It allows home sellers to sell their house directly to Zillow and get cash upfront to buy a new home. Zillow then prepares the house for sale and lists it, under representation from local brokerages.

The service aims to help the 61 percent of home sellers (according to Zillow’s latest research) who are also looking to buy at the same time. The offering is similar to Atlanta-based Knock, another real estate tech startup that launched in Atlanta as its first market about two years ago. Since then they have served 4,000 customers here, and raised $400 million in equity and debt funding last month to drive further national expansion in 2019.

Opendoor, another fast-growing platform, launched in the south in 2017. Within a year, Opendoor announced that they had chosen Atlanta as the location for their first non-California engineering hub. That hub, now located downtown, continues to expand, with several hundred employees across technology, sales, operations and customer service.

Zillow Offers entered Atlanta in 2018, along with Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Charlotte and Raleigh. The company has already announced plans to bring the service to at least eight new markets in 2019, including nearby Nashville, Orlando and Miami.

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