That's my guess also. If they have details on the specific aspects in the specific markets that drives prices, being able to "jump on a deal" could work out well.
The question becomes if there are enough opportunities like that to move the needle for them.
If I had to guess, I would have guessed moving into Lending Tree's matchmaking area would be easier and have a better ROI.
What specific details would they have that other's don't. I don't know how prevalent FSBO is on Zillow in some markets, but in mine it's extremely limited. I'd be shocked if it made up 5% of the residential market, probably closer to 1%.
The rest of the listings are from MLS systems and they pull housing data from county systems. For that, I'd assume there is a data broker and Zillow isn't integrating with thousands of counties. If that's the case, then both the MLS and county data can be had by anyone. With that information, you'd get lot details, house details, listing history, county tax valuations and sales history.
What other data do you need?
A lot of house flippers are agents because they get the MLS listings ahead of the public and can move faster on them. I don't know when Zillow gets their MLS data, but listings almost always hit Realtor.com a day before they hit Zillow, so I don't see that as an advantage either.
> The rest of the listings are from MLS systems and they pull housing data from county systems. For that, I'd assume there is a data broker and Zillow isn't integrating with thousands of counties.
That's not the case, MLS is a giant mess and the reason why Zillow was/is amazing is that it aggregated and normalized lots of different unconnected systems. They still have gaps and it's common for an individual MLS to play hard ball and not give out their data, but it's still a large competitive advantage.
They even know unlisted data, like which buyers are currently looking. If they combine it with data from social network partners and other providers they can know the school-friend networks of the buyer's kids, church affiliations, how racist they are, etc.
Wouldn't a place like Zillow have first hand knowledge? You can sign in with your facebook account, for example. Linking your account will give them your public profile, friend list and email address.
Do they have to sell the data for Zillow to figure it out? I assume at a certain point you get enough data from enough sources to make those inferences yourself.
You can sign up to Zillow via Facebook, where they get permission to pull the most relevant data points. They can then make additional inferences based on that.
Among other things they get access to "age range, gender, language", which in combination can often already be a good starting point. They also get access to the email address which can be used to pull more info via other APIs, if you have used that email much in the past. They also get access to "other public info", which I'm not 100% sure about, but I think that should be equivalent to what you see when you go on someones public profile page, and includes Page likes for a lot of people.
The question becomes if there are enough opportunities like that to move the needle for them.
If I had to guess, I would have guessed moving into Lending Tree's matchmaking area would be easier and have a better ROI.