HJ: How Photographers Can Resist Zillow’s Threat To Monopolize Real Estate15250

Originally Posted by GETMYVR
@Dataventurer which is why professional real estate photographers should be charging at least $750 minimum - minimum I said - for any photo shoot because that content is going to get stolen, reclaimed and redistributed without the copyright issuers permission. Who's protecting us?

It is our content, the pro photo guys and girls which Powers the reason people look at these sites to begin with. Nobody cares about text they want to see pictures videos and 3D tours when shopping for property.

I'm almost wondering if all us photographers and 3D photographers can form our own Union, and get Federal protections and legal power to challenge these big corporate elites that want to suffocate our intellectual property.

Originally Posted by lilnitsch
@Wingman

I have a $300 minimum to show up my average shoots hover around $500 ~ I have $3900 worth of scheduled shoots this week. While, it is still a job, it does pay decently

Originally Posted by @Dataventurer
Well, Dan, you put the bait in the water and I’m going to bite!...

Let me offer a short “executive summary” at the beginning of my “opinion piece”.

Every business must craft and promote their Unique Selling Proposition as the reason to do business with them over other options. In the case of HomeJab, I think they have focused upon a narrow and insignificant Benefit Set. The company expends a lot of ink attempting to create the perception of value for their target market, real estate photographers. I’m just not persuaded…

Targeted Stakeholders - #1 - The Real Estate Listing Agent
I see two distinct stakeholders involved here with separate concerns. The primary stakeholder creating the opportunity is the real estate agent who is representing a home owner, known as “the listing agent”. His fiduciary responsibility is to market the property to obtain the best deal available in the current market. There are lots of things involved: advising home preparation, improvements, staging, pricing, time of going on the market, negotiating offers, and taking the lead in marketing the property.

The Listing Agent makes decisions about when to list the property, when to host open house times, and where to advertise (social media, magazines, brokerage TV programs, brokerage websites, print media, flyers, post cards mailed out to the neighborhood, etc.) Almost always, the listing agent posts the property on the local MLS board with photos (at least!) and often with other media: photo slideshow, 360 tour, video, drone, single-page website where these media assets can display the property with everything in one location for easy viewing.

The information that the listing agent posts on the local MLS sometimes also gets posted by the brokerage (Coldwell Banker, Intero, ReMax, etc.). The listing information is “scraped” from either the listing brokerage site or the MLS and reposted to all the other search sites. This is where a savvy real estate agent will consider his options well (and some, admittedly, are oblivious to the details here in the deep weeds!). The agent’s fiduciary responsibility makes him responsible to place the property listing where it gets seen by the most eyeballs and for the most exposure time.
Many listing agents post their listings to the local MLS and their brokerage automatically also posts the listing to their company website. And that’s the end of it. But where are the eyeballs searching for homes? Here is a screen shot showing website traffic for August 2020 for Zillow and three other real estate websites.




As Dan mentioned during the webinar with Joe, Zillow and Trulia (a subsidiary), received 39% of WORLDWIDE real estate traffic (Monthly Visits) of the top ten international sites. I know that we are talking about a pie that can be sliced lots of ways to get a desired statistic. Let me just point out that Zillow that month had 289 million total visits. The second place on the list was Realtor.com with 145.9 million visits – HALF the traffic!

So if you are a big game hunter and you know that most of the animals in the area are hanging out around the biggest water hole, doesn’t it make sense that you’d want to get set up nearby? And if you had the choice of fishing at three different lakes but you heard that one lake was stocked last week with fish, where would you head? And, wouldn’t you think ahead about how to make best use of the opportunity to hunt at the big water hole or fish in the lake teeming with fish?

I assert that Zillow is the big watering hole and the teeming lake of fish. A wise real estate photographer would be counseling his real estate agent-client how to make best use of the Zillow platform for promoting their property listing.

Practically, to me that means optimizing the immersive media opportunities offered by the Zillow platform to present photos, 360 pics, and video in the most accessible manner. Photos are easy, they get scraped off the MLS site automatically. The 360 pics shot with the Zillow 3D Home app are featured in second position on the photo carousel. In the past couple months Zillow has also begun posting Matterport tours in the same spot. That’s nice because before, if you had put up a Matterport tour on the MLS, the link to it in the Zillow listing was buried as a text link down the right column in a place that required some searching to find. In addition to the 360 tour being featured on the Zillow listing, video can be uploaded to their platform and is displayed at the bottom of the photo carousel. Convenient!

Now here is where I found a real gap in understanding by my fellow-agents in my Coldwell Banker office. I found that many had very nice single-page websites for their listings whose URLs they added into the media links on the MLS (my MLS has four fields for media links). The problem – Zillow didn’t scrape those URLs into their listing info and many Zillow listings SHOWED ONLY PHOTOS! I found that most of the smaller real estate platforms did scrape the URLs, but it’s small consolation when there is comparatively fractional volumes of traffic on those smaller sites seeing that wonderful media.
Just to note where we are in our discussion, I am still focused on the first stakeholder, the real estate agent. What does HomeJab say to them to create value? Fear!

“…they (Zillow) really are competing with you at the end of the day,”
“At the end of the day, Zillow is your competitor. It's the wolf!”
[00:35:28]
“Do what you can to control your listing content and control the leads.”

“The way that you do that is by making sure that the videos and the virtual tours, the content that
people want to see when they're really serious; not just the photographs but the actual videos and
the virtual tours, make sure that, that's hosted off Zillow and I think that would be really
helpful.”
[00:38:29]
"Why are we doing this? We're feeding the beast" type of comments?
From a real estate photographer's standpoint, again, I think it's helpful because this is the
language of the customers. This is what the real estate agents are talking about. This is what
they're concerned about. This is a major issue for them and it involves their livelihood."

"As a business person, as a photographer, that's what resonates."

"I think it's, not only is it the truth, and I think it's good for the industry, but it's also a good
business strategy for the photographers to be doing this and telling their customers that “I will
help you to present this media off Zillow and it'll help you to help the industry, help your
career”.

"One thing that they can be doing and one thing we can do to help them is to shoot these beautiful
virtual tours and videos, and then help them to market them on their own sites, on their own
property pages, on their own hosting platforms, and keep it off of these big tech Silicon Valley
platforms and that's the idea.”

I cordially disagree with the ideas quoted above. Strongly…

Regarding the quote above “Do what you can to control your listing content and control the leads”, in the specific situation of a listing agent posting a property on Zillow, the main concern and main benefit of the Zillow platform for him is exposure to potentially interested buyers, not capturing leads! The listing agent’s phone number is shown in the listing’s right column information with a pop-up form to send a message. I call that a lead!

There are real estate agents who love to hate Zillow, but I would contend that most of those Zillow-hating agents are NOT listing agents selling the properties. Zillow captures buyer leads and then sells them for an exorbitant price to agents, giving them a reason to complain. But for a listing agent, Zillow provides incredible FREE visibility for properties, especially if every opportunity is taken to optimize the media presentation.

#2 - The Photographer
Let’s talk about the other stakeholder in this situation, the real estate photographer.

“By working with HomeJab, you have better control of your content.”
“Controlling your content is a valuable thing to the photographer and the agent.”

This pitch is not really creating a Unique Selling Proposition with perceived value for a photographer.

First, HomeJab presents the illusion that Zillow somehow will “control your content”. I know for a fact that Zillow strongly supports the rights of photographers to their media. I heard that directly from a director-level employee at Zillow during a telephone conversation with another employee, the Photography Account Coordinator of the Rich Media Experience Growth Group.

My experience is that once a listing is sold, the 360 tour and video are removed from the listing page.

As Dan mentioned, the Zillow 3D Home tour can be easily placed onto another website with an embed code, unbranded without any indication of origination at Zillow (let them host it for free!). And I have found that the Zillow 3D Home tours I created are still accessible to me after they are removed from the listing page. So I can use them for addition to my portfolio site.

Joe mentioned using EyeSpy360 as their platform of preference. I signed up for EyeSpy last year when it was first offered at a discount to members of the California Association of Realtors. It’s a great service with features beyond the Zillow 3D Home offering. But…. what benefit is a “better virtual tour” if it doesn’t get hits, displayed on a low-traffic brokerage site? EyeSpy just wasn’t providing enough incremental benefit to create a separate virtual tour in addition to the one I shot with the Zillow 3D Home app. I admit that there are some pretty slick alternative virtual tour platforms out there, but consider the cost/benefit situation. Fast and free is pretty compelling for a major segment of the housing market!

Here’s where I developed a two-pronged approach to the quantity/quality conundrum. Shoot the Zillow 3D Home virtual tour, shoot the walk-through video and upload it to Zillow, with pro photos. Then create a single page website on the Show and Tours site to combine all the media assets, property description, agent contact info and map. Grab that web page URL and use that in all the fields on the MLS listing for media. That single page website shows up on most of the other real estate websites for that property. One click and the viewer sees all the media assets in one beautiful presentation page. And you maximize the opportunity on the Zillow site.

With that idea, you could use EyeSpy360 or any other virtual platform on the single page website. But I find that simply adding the link to the unbranded Zillow 3D Home tour works fine. I discovered recently that Matterport tours were being positioned in the same location on the photo carousel as the Zillow 3D Home tours created with their app. I am exploring the cost/benefit equation on that option, might be worth it to have that as a higher-end offering to agents.

Lastly, the mention by Joe of “NFT”. First time I’ve heard of that. I am not looking to resell any of my media photos for property listings. So that angle has no value to me. Anybody else? Waiting…

Summary
Here are the claims I addressed here:
- Controlling your content - Posting media to Zillow gives it to them “in perpetuity”
- Zillow being viewed as a competitor
- Off-site hosting is better than using the Zillow platform
- Traceability of copyright ownership using NFT and block chain technology.

Epilog
I will stick with the Zillow platform but I did sign up a while back with HomeJab as a photographer. No calls yet. Maybe they read my previous post on the initial interview with Joe…