Reposted with permission from buildzoom.com.
On April 7, the freshly minted Zillow Group lost its single most important source of home sale listings when listing aggregator ListHub terminated its agreements with Zillow and Trulia, raising concerns that the real estate portals’ coverage would be devastated. The termination of the agreements marks the latest skirmish in the war between the Zillow Group and Move.com, which owns both the competing real-estate portal Realtor.com and ListHub.
If consumers discover that Zillow and Trulia fail to show them all of the homes for sale, no amount of brand loyalty will keep them away from Realtor.com. Anticipating possible devastation, the Zillow Group responded by creating a platform for agents and MLSs (multiple listing services) to easily provide it with listings directly, and by scrambling to recruit MLS cooperation throughout the nation. In fact, headlines over the past few weeks have been littered with reports of MLSs crossing the lines by the dozen, opting to provide listings directly to the Zillow Group.
Did the Zillow Group’s counter-strategy succeed, or has its listing stock been mortally decimated? To find out, we have been tracking the number of home sale listings on each of the three websites – Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com – once daily for each county in the US (we ignored the various types of foreclosure sales, as well as pending home sales and Zillow’s “make-me-move” listings.)
So far we see that although the Zillow Group’s stock of listings has taken a non-negligible hit, it is hardly the blow that was feared. In fact, in the large metropolitan areas where it matters the most, Zillow and Trulia have taken almost no hit at all. The Zillow Group’s coverage woes appear to be confined to rural America, and to a handful of metro areas in which the company now needs to concentrate its MLS recruitment efforts.
The national figures
Before ListHub pulled the plug on April 7, Zillow and Trulia had 2.2 and 2.1 million nationwide listings, respectively, while Realtor.com had 2.4 million. The chart below shows the how those numbers have trended since then.
Apparently, ListHub content was removed from Trulia between April 7and 8, and from Zillowbetween April 8 and 9. For Trulia, the removal coincided with a 16.3 percent drop in nationwide listings, whereas for Zillow it coincided with a smaller drop of just 11.9percentfrom the original level. Since then, the Zillow Group has clearly made an effort to incorporate data into its system from other sources, be they newly recruited MLS feeds, or data allegedly scraped from Realtor.com and elsewhere. The absence of April 12and 13figures for realtor.com from the chart below demonstrates Move.com’s successful efforts at thwarting systematic querying of the website.
The real story is in the geography
The national numbers tell only part of the story, and not the one that really matters. Consumers looking to buy a home do not search listings nationally, but locally, so while national stats may matter in the abstract, consumers are far more likely to ditch a website after discovering that local listings are missing. The crucial element of the story is therefore where Zillow and Trulia’s coverage has been hurt and where it has not, and is illustrated in the following maps.
The first map depicts the percentage change in Zillow’s number of listings by county from April 7to April 9, with lighter shades implying a greater loss of coverage. Small daily fluctuations in the number of listings are normal, and are captured by the second darkest shade, which spans all changes in Zillow’s listings smaller than 10 percent up or down. The fact that most of the map is this color indicates that, in most areas, Zillow’s coverage has not dramatically changed.
In contrast, the lighter shades of blue reflect areas in which Zillow’s number of listings has either mildly suffered or substantially deteriorated. Although sizable swaths of the map exhibit these colors, the areas hit tend to be disproportionately rural, with loss of coverage mostly bypassing the vast majority of metropolitan areas.
Finally, the darkest shade of blue indicates areas in which Zillow’s listings have actually increased. This is obviously not a direct result of the removal of ListHub content, but it is likely an indirect result, whereby the Zillow Group’s newly obtained data sources have generated a net improvement in coverage.
The second map repeats the exercise with respect to Trulia. Although the maps differ in detail, largely reflecting prior coverage differences between the two websites, the broad picture they paint for Trulia and Zillow is similar.
Beyond the maps – breakdown by metro area
The maps are useful in illustrating broad patterns of coverage loss versus retention, but in order to provide a more granular and precise record of the changes, we broke down the data by metro area. The numbers are given in the table below.
Metro Area
Population (2010)
Change in listings (%)
Zillow
Trulia
Realtor
Salt Lake City, UT Metro Area
1,087,873
-39.31
-35.33
0.19
Memphis, TN-MS-AR Metro Area
1,324,829
-36.41
-25.27
-3.58
Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC Metro Area
2,217,012
-33.10
-19.50
0.78
Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI Metro Area
1,555,908
-33.08
-31.30
0.69
Raleigh, NC Metro Area
1,130,490
-31.27
-21.47
0.77
Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO Metro Area
2,543,482
-30.93
-26.28
1.54
Oklahoma City, OK Metro Area
1,252,987
-25.59
-22.12
-0.14
San Diego-Carlsbad, CA Metro Area
3,095,313
-22.55
-17.72
0.78
Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN Metro Area
2,114,580
-22.49
-5.40
0.93
Birmingham-Hoover, AL Metro Area
1,128,047
-19.69
-14.53
0.73
Rochester, NY Metro Area
1,079,671
-17.22
-22.39
1.01
Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN Metro Area
1,235,708
-14.31
-9.45
0.11
Columbus, OH Metro Area
1,901,974
-10.98
-9.72
1.27
Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI Metro Area
3,348,859
-9.81
-10.19
0.98
Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC Metro Area
1,676,822
-8.51
-20.66
0.58
San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX Metro Area
2,142,508
-8.47
-27.16
0.51
San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA Metro Area
4,335,391
-7.62
-8.85
13.26
Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL Metro Area
5,564,635
-7.43
-3.59
-50.81
Kansas City, MO-KS Metro Area
2,009,342
-6.92
-18.33
1.10
Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, NV Metro Area
1,951,269
-6.45
-31.35
17.28
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA Metro Area
12,828,837
-4.65
-6.59
0.56
Pittsburgh, PA Metro Area
2,356,285
-3.23
-3.33
0.70
Jacksonville, FL Metro Area
1,345,596
-3.01
-2.76
0.28
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA Metro Area
3,439,809
-2.50
15.61
2.92
Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL Metro Area
2,783,243
-2.38
-13.03
0.19
Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX Metro Area
5,920,416
-2.01
-3.08
0.95
Sacramento-Roseville-Arden-Arcade, CA Metro Area
2,149,127
-1.91
-6.52
1.05
Austin-Round Rock, TX Metro Area
1,716,289
-1.81
-0.70
0.80
Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA Metro Area
4,224,851
-1.79
-3.55
0.16
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI Metro Area
1,443,963
-1.12
-6.31
1.04
Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD Metro Area
5,965,343
-1.00
-7.85
1.20
Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA Metro Area
2,226,009
-0.88
-10.61
0.59
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA Metro Area
5,286,728
-0.69
-5.53
-12.25
Cleveland-Elyria, OH Metro Area
2,077,240
-0.69
-16.55
0.67
Indianapolis-Carmel-Anderson, IN Metro Area
1,887,877
-0.38
-4.98
0.52
Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ Metro Area
4,192,887
0.25
-1.51
-0.31
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX Metro Area
6,426,214
0.32
-3.00
1.22
Richmond, VA Metro Area
1,208,101
0.85
-6.07
0.34
Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL Metro Area
2,134,411
1.05
-3.54
0.14
New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Metro Area
19,567,410
1.06
-3.18
0.90
Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT Metro Area
1,212,381
1.38
-0.55
28.58
Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, TN Metro Area
1,670,890
2.37
-28.77
0.77
New Orleans-Metairie, LA Metro Area
1,189,866
2.53
-0.99
-0.47
Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD Metro Area
2,710,489
4.00
-3.84
5.50
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV Metro Area
5,636,232
4.14
-4.66
8.50
Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH Metro Area
4,552,402
4.44
2.41
5.31
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metro Area
1,836,911
5.76
1.68
4.87
Providence-Warwick, RI-MA Metro Area
1,600,852
10.98
-23.96
1.49
Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI Metro Area
4,296,250
11.34
11.26
0.83
Buffalo-Cheektowaga-Niagara Falls, NY Metro Area
1,135,509
24.12
-23.45
0.66
St. Louis, MO-IL Metro Area
2,259,750
42.72
-7.66
1.18
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