With the changing of the leaves comes the changing of Zillow. Zillow, you know the one — that real estate website that has helped home buyers find houses for years — has decided to enter the mortgage game.

Yep, you read that right. Late Wednesday, the company completed its acquisition of Mortgage Lenders of America (MLoA). MLoA is a privately held online lender in Kansas… well, they were. They’ll still operate from their Kansas HQ and they’ll keep their VP, but Z is the captain now.

That’s one small step for home buyers and one giant leap for the real estate industry. All other aspects of consumerism has made its way to the ether, there’s no reason mortgage lending shouldn’t either.

Zillow has been in the search and listing side of real estate for over a decade now. However, they first dipped their toes into the selling side of the real estate biz when they announced their “Instant Offers” program, which allows sellers in particular markets to receive offers from investors. Shortly thereafter, in a fairly predictable move, they became an investor and purchased homes as well.

Becoming a lender was a very obvious next step for the online real estate site and has been a long time coming.

Now, with the acquisition of MLoA, they’ll have the capacity to be more than just an investor. To accompany the acquisition, there’s supposedly a rebrand for MLoA in the near future, too.

This acquisition certainly opens avenues to develop tools and partnerships.

“Getting a mortgage can be the toughest, most painstaking and time-consuming part of the home-buying process,” Greg Schwartz, president of media and marketplaces at Zillow, said in a statement. “Having our own mortgage origination service as an option for consumers will allow us to streamline the process for people who buy a Zillow-owned home.”

This is a huge move for Zillow. They went from showing home buyers homes to actually buying homes and now financing the buyers purchasing those home.

While this certainly streamlines, shortens, and simplifies the home-buying process for consumers in the Zillow Offers world, it will be interesting to see how it effects them as a company and the mortgage industry as a whole.

It’s official: WeWork now rents more office space than anyone in Manhattan—including their previous competitor, JP Morgan. With 5.3 million square feet of rented space, the coworking company clearly intends to maintain its momentum, thus lending credit to the inherent value of social work environments.

The sheer growth WeWork has seen in 2018 speaks to the notion that the coworking craze — perhaps surprisingly — isn’t slowing down.

While WeWork (and other similarly themed companies) only accounted for 3.3 percent of the new leases signed in 2017, they ate up 9.7 percent of new leases signed in the first two-thirds of 2018. Those aren’t the numbers of a trend in decline.

Despite some water cooler disdain toward WeWork’s potentially wishy-washy work culture and some of their latest publicity stunts, investors seem to like them more than ever. In fact, word on the street is that SoftBank — a prolific WeWork investor — is considering a second investment that would value WeWork at or around 40 billion dollars.

Like we said: not a sign of a declining company.

WeWork’s objective success isn’t the star of the show here, however; it’s what they’ve proven through that success which matters.

WeWork’s ethos (that human beings need interaction with other similar human beings in order to thrive in a workplace) gets further reinforced with every lease the company signs.

If small- to mid-sized companies can take away one thing from WeWork’s example, it’s this – many people need other people in order to do their best work.

There will always be exceptions to the rule—plenty of folks work alone from home and are happy to do so—but the fact that freelancers living in some of the most expensive real estate in this country are willing to pay additional cash just to be around other like-minded individuals is fairly indicative.

If nothing else, keep in mind the social atmosphere afforded by WeWork when designing your office spaces or nailing down your workplace culture expectations. And yes, they allow Realtors and brokers to lease space, too…

California photographer, George Gutenberg filed a lawsuit today against Zillow, alleging copyright violations for their use of his real estate photos, indicating that Zillow scrapes images from Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) rather than using listing data syndicated to them.

Court documents request a bench trial, damages (plus attorney’s fees and court costs), and that Zillow stop using Gutenberg’s copyrighted images. Under 17 U.S.C. § 504, Gutenberg is seeking “an amount to be proven or, in the alternative, at Plaintiff’s election, an award for statutory damages against Defendant in an amount up to $150,000.00 for each infringement pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §
504(c), whichever is larger.”

If Gutenberg were to win, Exhibit A of the lawsuit cites 543 images in question across 17 listings on Zillow, which would total $81,450,000 or more.

The issue of real estate photography copyrights has long been convoluted. There are six stakeholders that have consistently argued that they own images used in real estate listings: homeowners, real estate photographers, the listing agent, the broker, MLSs, and real estate listing websites.

The argument that homeowners own the rights to images taken of their property has very little merit, and we have uncovered no copyright lawsuits that a homeowner has won regarding photography.

One can see why an agent or broker believes they have the right to the images they’ve paid for, but those parties don’t always read their photographer’s agreement prior to paying their invoice, while MLSs and websites have slid into their Terms of Service that they own the copyright once it is uploaded to their servers (be it directly or via syndication).

But what is different about Gutenberg’s position than many others is that he retains the copyright to all photographs taken of each property, allowing the agent a “limited license to use the photographs for up to one-year purposes of marketing the property.”

Wouldn’t that include Zillow? Nope.

The license “expressly states that it is not transferrable and prohibits third party use without permission from Gutenberg.”

Unlike many photographers, Gutenberg actually registers his images with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Mathew Higbee of Higbee and Associates issued the following statement to The American Genius:

“Mr. Gutenberg has a robust working relationship with many top real estate agents in southern California and across the nation. Mr. Gutenberg’s clients gladly pay to license his work knowing that Mr. Gutenberg’s high-quality photographs and signature style add significant value to their listings. In addition to real estate listings, Mr. Gutenberg also licenses of his photographs for editorial and commercial use in print and online publications, advertisements, and retail and commercial businesses.

Rather, it appears that Zillow, owner of the largest real estate website in the world, indiscriminately copies millions of photographs per day off of the MLS in an effort to build what they refer to as their ‘Living Database of All Homes,’ which Zillow has leveraged into multi-billion dollar company. Zillow’s unlawful copying comes at the expense of creators and rights holders such as Mr. Gutenberg who depend on payment of reasonable licensing fees by those who exploit their works.”

The implication is that the clients are not in violation of the copyright if they didn’t syndicate listings to Zillow or upload them directly. A claim that is far heavier than a standard copyright lawsuit, and stands to call into question Zillow’s practices.

The internet has long changed how people copyright images, who owns them, what agreements each party enters as they upload and/or syndicate data to third party sites. This isn’t the first lawsuit of this nature, nor the last.

We’ll keep you updated as this lawsuit progresses.