Keller Williams sending listings to Zillow

Keller Williams Realty Inc. will automatically feed the listings of the company's 73,000 associates to Zillow.com on a daily basis, the companies announced.

Keller Williams is the latest member of the Zillow Listings Feed Program, launched in November to allow real estate brokerages to post for-sale listings directly to the site in a bulk feed. The listings include property descriptions, photos and contact information for listing agents, with Zillow providing links back to the broker.

Cary Sylvester, director of technology with the Keller Williams Realty International Service Center, said all leads generated by agents' listings on Zillow will go directly to the listing agent at no charge. Zillow also allows individual agents to create a free profile page with photos, contact information and more details about the agent, linked directly from each listing.

Offering automated property valuations, or "Zestimates," and other information about properties and housing markets, Zillow claims more than 5 million unique visitors a month. The company says that two-thirds of visitors to the site are in the market to buy or sell a home now, or plan to within the next two years.

Zillow receives property listings information from a combination of agents, brokers and MLSs, with nearly 1.9 million for-sale listings available on the site Wednesday.

Those who choose to send listings to Zillow and other sites that aggregate listings hope to benefit from the sites' ability to attract large audiences and come up on top of search-engine rankings.

Not all are brokers are convinced of the benefits of sharing property listings with aggregators. The real estate search and marketing site Trulia, which relies primarily on data feeds supplied by real estate brokers, recently came under fire for allegedly using listings to boost the site's search-engine rankings at the expense of companies that provide listings.

Trulia denied that its use of "temporary redirects" and "no follows," hurts brokers that send its listings, saying its business model is to generate traffic for them.

Although Realtor.com and Yahoo Real Estate may employ similar search-engine optimization techniques, they receive listings from Realtor-affiliated MLSs and are bound by rules that Trulia is not, according to Galen Ward, co-founder for Seattle-based Estately.com, who first raised the issue (see Inman News story).

Realtor.com recently announced it is updating about one-third of the site's 4.4 million property listings every 15 minutes (see story).

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