Being in the Real Estate Industry, I downloaded Zillow’s app.
Zillow is the most prominent real estate portal in America. Through the Zillow app, there many options to find useful real estate information from decorating your home to renting an apartment or finding professional help.
Once I downloaded Zillow‘s app, I let the app find my location. It will suggest via the map real estate deals that were in my area. This works for both rentals and sales.
Now I am able to filter what I am looking for so this will narrow the search. This is a beneficial tool because by identifying the requirements, I will only spend time looking at deals that are within my criteria. The map feature is user-friendly, and you scroll through and pick out the areas where you prefer to live or invest.
Another feature that makes Zillow very successful is the possibility of inserting the address of virtually any house that has ever been in the MLS (Multiple Listings Service) and to be able to know the full story of the house. So I can check the pictures, how much it was sold for in previous years, how much tax it pays per year, and all the characteristics like the year it was built, lot size, etc.
It does have a system that can predict the value of the house and of the potential rent. The information is very reliable. Indeed many investors use it to identify the approximate value of the house based on Zillow’s price.
It does have a forum within the app where you can ask questions and get help or just get an opinion from a professional realtor.
The success of this app is also due to the review of realtors. Realtors engage with the clients by asking a question, and they can sell their professionalism with the answers they give. Clients can browse the forum and select an agent that inspires more trust. The latter reflects the concept learned in our first Lecture in which we spoke about the evolution of the expert friend and the importance of the new generation to rely on a specific review to choose to buy a particular product or service.
In Zillow’s app, this is precisely what happens. Realtors engage with the customers and sell themselves, their ability, their capability, and professionalism. When they have made a positive impression, they will be chosen by potential clients. Their business model to create revenue is clear. They afford the possibility of realtors to introduce and advertise themselves so that all that interaction with the users earns potential rewards.
The revenue must be huge because they also advertise mortgages and rehabbing. So through the app, I can basically order a new kitchen or bathroom. I can choose the style and the color and have an instant quote.
I sit on my sofa while I get all this from my iPad.
The app does not have coupon or discount, so it leverages on the cognitive need of the users. Zillow provides all the information a user could wish to have instantaneously. People can use Zillow to study and evaluate and compare the rentals or the buying. Zillow’s strategy has been to invest in the data collection of all the transactions in real estate in the USA and create a way to analyze the data and provide it free and in an easy to read format for everyone.
They created their power from sharing for free all the data collected, that’s a fantastic innovation, what we learned until now proves how useful and valuable can be the analysis of data, analyzing data can help to develop a strategy for positioning for advertisement, etc.
The innovation of Zillow was to share for free those enormous amounts of data to become popular and visited and as happen eventually leverage this position to grow and start to create revenue.
I always thought that the apps or the socials or the video that are most successful are the ones that before charging try to give a proper contribution or advantage to the user. If you provide a free solution to a gap in the market and that solution has value, it’s only matter of time before users will come. Then you can produce a proper revenue late with aggregates services.
Internet population loves the word free, and they recognize value and power of proper content, and I find it so far, more than simple discount or coupon but an app with no substance.
The power of providing information and proper content will generate a real keen interest in the app. This is rather than just downloading an app with the intention of getting a discount coupon. I think the genuine keen interest in using an application that is beneficial for a business or a personal life will always be superior to the attempt to buy a client by offering a discount coupon.
