Zillow Hack- How to Get Around the New $9.95 Per Listing Charge

A major sticking point for agents

Yesterday, we reported news from Zillow that they added lease listings to their offering but don’t have MLS feeds pulling yet, so they’ll be charging $9.95 per manually uploaded listing, giving it 180 days as a featured listing on the site.

While the hack we’re about to show you will not give you featured listing status, it will keep $9.95 in your pocket for all of the other vendors who like to say “it’s only $25 per listing” or “it’s only $29.99 per month” (with the ultimate implication being you aren’t paying 20 vendors per listing).

What the charge REALLY means

Zillow notes that only 3% of their listings are manually uploaded, but if you do the math on home sales only (we’re not even talking about lease listings that will be flooding their site), they’ll pull in nearly $1.2 million for the first 180 days, then another $1.2 million for the next 180 days and so on and so forth, putting $2.4 million annually into the Zillow bank. That’s no chump change.

But I’ll give you a hint: Zillow’s smart and they know as a tech savvy Realtor that you’ll read Agent Genius and learn the hack, so this measure of charging manually is not to punish all lease and sale listings by agents, the $9.95 charge has two fuctions: to have a featured listing status and to pick up coin from the unsuspecting FSBO.

Okay, so here’s the hack:

As Zillow gears up to compete more closely with sites like RPR, Realtor.com, Apartments.com, Rent.com, Craigslist and others, we thought it might be cool to show you how to still have your listing appear on Zillow.com without having to pay yet another fee.

Here is how you get around the $9.95 charge: upload your listing to a syndication site (a few are listed here) and tell it to syndicate to Zillow. That’s not a manual upload and it will not charge you any additional money to list on Zillow. It’s not only more efficient to go the syndication route, it saves you money. Some sites to try out for syndicating your listings to Zillow among other sites are vFlyer, Postlets, Real Estate Shows, and I’m not sure, but Real Bird and PostYourListings, might work with Zillow as well (some of these I’ve used, others I haven’t).

And voila, you’ve hacked the Zillow charges!