Zillow announced late this evening that it has inked a deal with Yahoo! Real Estate to expand Zillow’s real estate search to Yahoo! property hunters. This deal also extends Zillow’s Premier Agent product offering to Yahoo!. The number two and three most popular real estate sites combine to make a powerful foe to Trulia’s recent partnership with CNNMoney.com announced yesterday.
Recently, Zillow’s data accuracy was called into question after Forbes released unfiltered Zillow property data, bringing the state of Colorado to a boil having been listed as the second worst selling market in the country as sourced by Zillow. Forbes later pulled all related articles after Colorado Realtor Kristal Kraft and others went after the allegedly flawed interpretation of Zillow’s data.
This brings us to the age old question of whether Zillow, Trulia and others should be used as source for any absolute property data, and why a partnership with Realtor.com, America’s most popular and reliable property search portal wasn’t more appealing to media giants Yahoo! and CNNMoney.
We also wonder if this is really good news for agents regardless of the added agent exposure of Yahoo! Real Estate and Premier Agent when you consider Realtor branded Realtor.com is an advocate for Realtors, and companies like CNN and Yahoo! minimize the Realtor Association in general.
What are consumers gaining by these partnerships? We presume more headaches on a wider scale when they realize the data they may be generating may be flawed. One of the reasons for the flaws, again, are third party aggregators that provide agent and Realtor tools offering syndication that fails to expire on its own or is left forgotten after the property is sold or removed from market.
