Zillow has been an interesting real estate technology company to watch over the years, starting out recruiting top talent, then reorganizing and cutting staff in 2008, then earlier this year, we reported their plans to go public next year.
As they march toward IPO candidacy in 2011, they have been reorganizing behind the scenes as proved by today’s announcement that Spencer Rascoff is being promoted to CEO of Zillow.
With time at Expedia and Hotwire.com under his belt, Spencer Rascoff joined Zillow in March 2005 as one of the original executive team members and was named chief operating officer in October 2008.
As for Rich Barton who has been the CEO since 2005, according to Zillow.com, he will “continue to be actively involved in Zillow as executive chairman of the board of directors. Fellow co-founder Lloyd Frink will move from president to the new full-time role of chief strategy officer.”
Challenges for Zillow
Although Zillow partnered with Yahoo! Real Estate earlier this year, widely expanding their offering and presence, Zillow’s bread and butter is still data which has recently been challenged.
In May of this year, we reported a data reliability issue when Forbes.com named Denver as one of the worst housing markets in America, having used Zillow data as their primary source of information, conflicting wildly with local market data from Realtors and Board data.
Forbes had reported just ten months earlier that Denver is the best place in America to buy a home, leading agents, reporters and even a Gubernatorial candidate to question Forbes’ reporting who in turn pointed to Zillow as their data source and one they will no longer be using due to this issue. Zillow’s response was that Forbes should have contacted them directly which led us to ask if all consumers should contact the public relations department at Zillow when they perform a search?
This along with a rising number of competitors entering the market will provide Zillow with some steep challenges as they get closer to their potential public status and with Rascoff having been such a major part of the organization for many years, we doubt that these unaddressed challenges will be overcome.
All that said, we anticipate that whether in 2011 or 2012, Zillow will reach their goal of achieving IPO status.
