On Make Me Moves, the average gap between a MMM and a Zestimate is about 15%, so while there are clearly outliers I’d say that on the whole the Make Me Move prices are pretty much “in play”. In my neighborhood in Seattle, there are about a dozen legit MMM homes that have reasonable prices posted on them. A buyer who wants to live in this specific neighborhood would definitely be well-served to consider Make Me Move homes here. I don’t know the Santa Barbara market as well (though I do hold a secret desire to live there some day, and I visited many times when I lived in LA). I did check our traffic stats for Santa Barbara and in March09 we got 30,270 total visitors (which translates to about 20,000 unique visitors), up 51% over Mar08 for the Santa Barbara area. I suspect that puts Zillow among the 2 or 3 most visited real estate sites in Santa Barbara. It stands to reason that there are at least some legit Make Me Move homes that buyers’ agents should consider for their clients.

In terms of how to promote yourself better on Zillow, either Sara Bonert (director of broker services) or I will follow up with a separate comment here.

Greg…things change quickly so maybe if you type in one hour later it changes…that is my guess.

Spencer…thanks for the thoughts. Personally I think zillow has its place for certain people. It provides good tools to certain people. We are all different.

My experience unfortunately has not been great with zillow and many others who I talk to have the same thoughts. I have sent a few emails to ask zillow questions and get no responses. You also have to be a genius to find a zillow phone number…this is a pet peeve with me. Not the customer service that I would hope for and expect. On top of this, RE happens quickly much of the time and you need relatively instant info.

Regarding FSBO’s we get these lists as well, they are just not on my site as the vary so much in so many ways. So if someone is working with a local Realtor that is on top of the market they know about these as well. Again, in our town there are additionally a fair amount of pocket listings and sellers that would sell that you would never get from a big aggregate site.

As far as the make me move listings…to me this is a marketing thing/ploy. Basically is says to me…buyer if you want to overpay, here is your price. I would be happy to point out all of them in Santa Barbara if you would like. Let me know if you think differently.

I also have a hard time with how to promote myself on Zillow. It seems to me that many agents come up way ahead of me that I am shocked about. Not sure the formulas for these, but some people have 99 years experience and thus come up first in Santa Barbara???? The first 5 agents that come up under Santa Barbara for the listings tab are basically non existent in Santa Barbara…they all do business in other areas. So to me this is not helpful at all to the consumer and is not controlled by zillow. Let me know if you have thoughts.

Take care

I just did a search on Zillow for Santa Barbara and we have 859 homes for sale including 13 FSBOs (which probably aren’t on Realtor.com or on an IDX site), and 101 “Make Me Move” homes which are only on Zillow.

There’s no doubt that, for now, there are some listings that are on an IDX site that aren’t on Zillow. But there are also listings on Zillow which aren’t on an IDX site.

If I had a friend looking for a home in Santa Barbara, I’d advise them to use Zillow and an IDX site such as yours.

Kevin, the bigger question is: given how poorly Trulia did in your survey, why do you have the “view my profile on trulia” link but you don’t have your Zillow badge on this site? Looks like you’ve used Zillow Advice a bit in the past — thank you. There are some good threads in there, just waiting for an agent like you to go and answer…
http://www.zillow.com/advice/santa-barbara/all/question-discussion-guide/

Alas, I think they found a loophole in the transparency code.