Douglas Elliman Real Estate, the U.S.’s fourth-largest brokerage, will begin marketing its more than 9,000 listings on Zillow this week.
Under the marketing partnership, the New York City-based firm’s listings will show up as “featured listings” on Zillow, pushing them to the top of search results on Zillow’s website, mobile apps and the sites it powers including AOL Real Estate and HGTV’s FrontDoor.
With the agreement, Douglas Elliman also guarantees that just its listing agents will be featured on their listings on Zillow, Zillow spokeswoman Amanda Woolley said. No ads from competing agents will show up on the brokerage’s listings.
In addition, Douglas Elliman gets the benefits that come with the free Zillow Pro for Brokers program, including a logo and a linkback on property detail pages of listings it represents, and prominent placement of the listing agents’ contact info.
More than 1,000 brokers participate in the Zillow Pro for Brokers program, which is available to firms who provide Zillow a direct feed.
“This ultimate pairing of technology, data, and face-to-face information is designed to provide the best possible service to the customer,” said Dottie Herman, president and CEO of Douglas Elliman, in a statement. “This is a core element of our brand promise, to be where our customers are.”
Douglas Elliman, whose $15 billion in sales volume in 2013 made it the fourth-largest brokerage in the U.S., joins another large brokerage, Howard Hanna Real Estate Services operator Hanna Holdings Inc., in paying to enhance its listings on Zillow.
In 2012, Howard Hanna invested seven figures in separate agreements with Zillow and realtor.com to enhance its listings while preventing ads or lead forms for other companies’ agents from appearing alongside them.
Both Zillow and its competitor Trulia have been making a push to get direct feeds from brokers and multiple listing services to improve the accuracy, timeliness and comprehensiveness of their listing databases. Their chief rival, realtor.com, gets listings directly from over 800 MLSs across the U.S.
Douglas Elliman has more than 4,000 agents in 70 offices in New York City, Westchester and Putnam counties in New York, Long Island, The Hamptons, South Florida and Los Angeles.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to note that Douglas Elliman listing agents will be exclusively featured on their Zillow listings and that Douglas Elliman Real Estate will be sending all of its approximately 9,000 listings to Zillow. A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that the brokerage represented 90,000 listings.
