There is nothing to like about Zillow as an agent. It's expensive, limiting and ineffective as a lead generation or advertising platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Zillow provides two services:
1. Free home search tools to homebuyers
2. Paid lead generation for real estate agents
The majority of the reviews online clearly are from the former group, reviewing the latter group (often excellent agents that are not affiliated with Zillow, outside of paying Zillow for those leads) or the home search tools at Zillow.com, which are decent.
The issue is, the paid lead generation (aka Zillow Premiere Agent), in our experience, is a HORRIBLE service for real estate agents like ourselves, and Zillow itself treats its paying customers (at least us and many other agents we've spoken to) terribly. So the ratings on this site are deceivingly positive, when the truth is that Zillow itself is destroying the livelihood of agents like us by not being upfront about their lead generation service.
We invested over $36,000 into Zillow lead generation and got nothing for it. Only after being locked into a contract for 6 months, did we find out that LEADS ARE NOT EXCLUSIVE. Agents, read that again. The leads you PAY FOR (in SoCal they're often $800+ per lead) are NOT exclusive to you. You have 30 days to get the lead to proactively opt-in to an exclusivity agreement with you—if they don't respond or decline the invite, they go back into the pool for other agents.
As we all know, leads are often unresponsive in the beginning, so this system is designed for failure. This allows Zillow to make money on the same lead sent to multiple paying advertisers. I don't know about you, but if I had known that upfront I NEVER would have signed up. The contract doesn't mention this anywhere, neither does the sales representative. Neither does the website training documents, or the onboarding manuals/conversations you have with your account rep. You are left to figure this hindrance out for yourself, and once you do, they refuse to let you out of your contract for any reason.
On top of this, the majority of the "leads" you get are people who think you're either a Zillow employee, or the listing agent. They very often already have agents representing them, and are just calling for info on the property, not because they're interested in hiring a buyer's agent. So you're paying hundreds of dollars to talk to waste-of-time tire kickers with absolutely no intention of ever using you.
In a response to my BBB complaint, Zillow claimed "We provide agent-ready buyer leads to local real estate agents and in that process, these leads remain exclusive to the agent we connect them with." This is objectively false on several accounts. The leads are not agent-ready, as explained above, and they're not exclusive!
In my opinion, Zillow is destroying the real estate industry through deceptive practices. It's ironic, since Zillow can attribute its success directly to the realtors from whom it originally "borrowed" the MLS listings that realtors have to pay for the privilege to post to. Now, Zillow is opening its own brokerage, literally stepping on the heads of the industry professionals they used to get to where they are in the process.
This company, in my opinion, does NOT have agents' best interests at heart, and in fact deceives them with false promises and lack of transparency relating to the severe limitations voluntarily implemented by them in their own system.
Let this be a stern warning to any other agent thinking of investing, you could easily end up like me—out almost $40k with nothing to show for it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
