When managing a brokerage, it can be difficult to decide what tools are worth your time and which ones will bring the greatest return on investment. But it’s a much easier decision when the tools you choose are free, easy to set up and essentially automated upon activation—tools like Zillow Pro for Brokers.
Hundreds of brokerages have signed on to Zillow Pro for Brokers, a program that improves listings accuracy, provides better reporting, and increases the visibility of listing agents. In this program, Zillow sets up a direct listings feed from the brokerage, thereby negating the need for manual entry sites—often the culprit of stale listings, inaccurate data and leads on properties no longer available.
With a direct feed, Zillow can ensure that agents appear next to their listings for every search, and it can also share with brokers useful metrics—like search results, listing views and email contacts—to help them monitor performance and work smarter.
Zillow Pro for Brokers partner Gino Blefari, CEO of Intero Real Estate Services, says that the program gives his agents a great base to grow their accounts and become more active, increasing their individual leads.
“The listing data has been clean, and quickly synced with our feeds,” says Blefari. “At Intero, we drive our syndication leads back to our agents, and we have quite a few agents thriving off of leads directly from Zillow.”
The program also offers quality client service, maximizing exposure for listings, and allowing agents to communicate quickly and easily with buyers and sellers.
“Our marketing department has a sole Zillow representative who answers the phone and responds to emails in a timely manner, providing my agents with confidence when it comes to their properties showing up exactly as they want them to,” says Blefari, who notes that their representative typically solves any problems that may arise within minutes.
Partnering with Zillow gives real estate teams an automatic visibility boost by providing access to the company’s extensive online reach; Zillow currently leads consumer traffic with 70 million unique users*.
And when it comes to mobile, Zillow’s numbers cannot be beat. Nearly 400 million homes were viewed on Zillow Mobile in January 2014 alone, according to Google Analytics—that’s 148 homes per second. “Mobile is where it’s at now,” comments Blefari. “If you’re not visible on mobile devices, you’re not found.
“As a broker, I think Zillow has hit it on the nail in regard to helping us make our agents happy,” says Blefari. “By highlighting agents on their listings, and giving our staff a customer service rep, Zillow makes us look like heroes.”
For more information visit http://zillow.com.
*Source: Google Analytics, January 2014
For more information on Zillow Pro for Brokers, email Zillow’s Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Chris Crocker, at crocker@zillow.com.