Top 10 Zillow Tools for Real Estate Professionals

Guest contributor Sara Bonert:

With more than 19 million people visiting the Zillow website and Zillow Mobile applications each month*, this is a huge audience for you to grow your business. Here are my favorite 10 tips to get started. Best of all, they are all FREE.

1. Create a profile. Want links back to your site? Great visibility to millions who visit Zillow every month? It all starts with creating a free account on Zillow. Start by clicking “Register” in the upper right-hand corner of the the site. Be sure to register using the same email address that you use as the contact address on your listings. Check out this video for more information on how and why to activate your account.

Rate Your Agent 2. Get Reviews. Agent Ratings and Reviews (see screenshot) are a powerful way to help potential clients understand the high service levels an agent is able to provide. A Zillow Premier Agent with just 5 reviews tends to get about 150% more leads than one with 0 reviews. We offer great tools to help you get more reviews.

3. Zillow Advice. This is a question-and-answer forum that brings home buyers, sellers, owners, rent, landlords, lenders, and other real estate professionals together in a very helpful way. Answering questions helps build your online reputation of being knowledgeable about a particular region or subject matter. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds or get email alerts for any topic and specify your geographic location.

4. Zestimate Accuracy Chart. How many clients have said, “...But Zillow says…?” Equip yourself with the Zestimate Accuracy Chart so you can describe to your clients — using data — how accurate the Zestimate® home valuation is in your specific county.

5. Comment publicly on a Zestimate. As the homeowner or the listing agent, you can leave public comments on a listing on Zillow when the Zestimate is too high, too low, or just right on a particular home. It is yet another marketing opportunity to publicly demonstrate your expertise and explain how the Zestimate relates to the home’s listing price.

6. Local market data: Zillow has data on more than 100 million homes in the U.S. We aggregate all this data and package it up under the Local Info tab. Here you can easily create powerful trend graphs and use the import feature to place this information on your site or blog. Remember — content is king!

7. Zillow Widgets. Want free, relevant, interesting and dynamic real estate data for your website or blog — for free? Then look no further than the Zillow Widget page (see screenshot). We feature many great widgets, such as Most Expensive Local Homes, Local Mortgage Rates, Recently Sold, Agent Review Widgets and more!

Zillow iPhone App 8. Zillow Mobile Apps. Download one of our free, popular iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry or Windows Mobile applications. They are all GPS-enabled, meaning that as you are out driving around with clients, you can easily see the estimated values of homes around you.

9. Zillow Profile. Yes, back to this one. Now that you’ve created the account, make sure to fully deck out your profile. This includes adding things like links to your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts; including a video; adding marketing text; and, of course, uploading a photo. Here is a great example of a complete profile.

10. Zillow Academy. This is a lot, isn’t it? And there is much more! If you want to keep on top of all the ways to use Zillow AND learn about other online marketing techniques, please bookmark www.ZillowAcademy.com. We have awesome classes every week!

*Source: Internal tracking by Omniture, March 2011.