Real estate behemoth Zillow Group wants to help real estate brokerages turn more leads into commissions.
The company rolled out a new platform today — “Premier Broker” — that aims to help brokers raise their visibility on Zillow Group sites as well as route, nurture, keep track of and convert leads.
Greg Schwartz
“Over the years, brokers have told us the challenges they have with acquiring quality leads and ensuring their agents effectively nurture them to conversion,” said Greg Schwartz, Zillow Group chief business officer, in a statement.
“We created Premier Broker to help brokers maximize their value to agents with a single integrated platform of tools and services we know to be effective in driving lead conversion.
“Premier Broker leverages our successful Premier Agent program to deliver the real-time access to real estate agents that buyers and sellers are demanding.”
Premier Agent and Premier Broker — what’s the difference?
The Premier Agent and Premier Broker programs will differ in that “Premier Broker impressions will have specific brokerage branding on them featuring either the broker or the team lead, versus Premier Agent advertising that features a specific agent,” Zillow Group spokeswoman Amanda Woolley told Inman via email.
“Premier Agents that are part of a team or brokerage can still purchase individual advertising as they have in the past.”
Pricing for the Premier Broker platform, which is separate from broker advertising opportunities, will vary from market to market, she added.
According to a press release, the platform offers:
- A custom-built broker profile page that is displayed on for-sale and not-for-sale home detail pages on Zillow and Trulia to attract both buyers and sellers.
- Concierge services to help qualify, route and follow up on leads.
- A new lead routing system that broadcasts leads to a group of agents by phone in an order pre-determined by the broker.
- Lead conversion training from Zillow Group, which offers online and in-person lead conversion training courses for agents and brokers.
- Performance reporting that provides real-time data on key business measures, including lead volume, pipeline development, pending/closed sales and agent performance, followed up by account specialists who work with agents to improve lead conversion.
The company debuted the platform today at its Zillow Group Broker Forum in Denver.
50 shades of integration
The launch appears to be another step in Zillow Group’s ongoing effort to weave itself into the fabric of the real estate tech ecosystem.
Last week, the company unveiled “dotloop Connect,” which integrates its dotloop transaction management platform with a range of real estate tech tools covering everything from lead generation and reputation management to accounting and payment processing.
Other moves by Zillow Group this year that have thrust the company deeper into the real estate tech software space include its acquisition of listing management software provider Bridge Interactive Group and its debut of Retsly Connect, a platform that can simplify connectivity between tech vendors and multiple listing services (MLSs).
Earlier this year, Zillow Group updated its Premier Agent program with team profiles, an expanded “Agent Concierge” program that uses Zillow employees to qualify phone leads before the call gets routed to an agent, lead routing for teams and brokerages, lead reporting and ranking, referral tracking, and a self-service shopping cart for ZIP code ads.
Mixed reception?
While some brokerages will likely welcome Zillow Group’s latest offering, others may be wary.
Just today, cloud-based brokerage eXp Realty announced a deal making Commissions Inc. its lead generation and CRM software provider. The deal was part of a “portal strategy” designed to keep the brokerage relevant to agents in the face of competition from third-party portals such as Zillow and realtor.com.
“The relevancy of a brokerage in the face of a significant percentage of lead generation for the agents who work for the firm being generated through third-party portals does raise the question of relevancy to the agents that work for the brand,” said the brokerage’s parent company, eXp World Holdings, in its latest quarterly report.
“We see this as a real threat to us as a real estate brokerage and we are proactively developing low-cost lead generation platforms that our agents can take advantage of, which provide significant cost savings versus going through third-party syndicators.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated.
