A great year end summary from Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s CFO and VP of Marketing – make sure you read his post It’s a Wrap.
I think Spencer is pretty bang-on with his top 10 stories (I’ll let you read them over on his post). Inman News (my employer) also recently posted its Top real estate stories of 2007 too.
Let me try and summarize both.
Industry/Markets = doing bad. Technology/Innovation = doing well.
My guess is that 2008 is going to be a reconciling of these two forces. Forces that seem to be pulling further away from each other more and more.
In the spirit of New Year’s predictions, Spencer wraps his wrap with some thoughts about Zillow…
In 2008, Zillow will improve Zestimate accuracy; launch a mortgages product; significantly increase revenue and approach profitability; become the most visited real estate Web site in at least several key cities; cross the 1 million listings milestone; and much more.
Pretty bold predictions. It’ll definitely be interesting to see how they plan on attacking each.
I think the key item on that list (starts with a ‘P’) is the most questionable.
So my big prediction (and it’s a bit of a cop-out) is because of questions around profitability (and Z’s burn rate), we’re going to see more and more speculation on the fate of Real Estate 2.0’s highest profile player… Acquisition? IPO? (see The Fool thinks we should look out for…). I’m not sure that 2008 will see resolution any of those questions, but I suspect the chorus will begin to grow louder. Altos Research also thinks 2008 will be the year Rich Barton moves on.
So what are your Zillow predictions for 2008?
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