Using Zillow is often considered a no brainer for real estate professionals. While the exposure and name recognition are great benefits for your brand, there are some drawbacks to using the real estate giant. Below we dive deeper into both sides of Zillow.

Pros:

• Listing exposure to millions of consumers.
• Gives consumers access to non agent represented properties, essentially every listing available.
• Agents can advertise skills to a broad audience.
• The playing field is more level for newer agents and agents without many listings.
• Zillow Premier Agent, ability to pay Zillow for more traffic to your listings.
• Premier Agents get a WordPress website.

Cons:

• Zillow’s property valuations tool, Zestimate, is often inaccurate. This misleads buyers and sellers and often makes an agent’s job harder.
• Promotes non listing agents alongside listings that aren’t theirs; this fools consumers into thinking the agent shown knows the property.
• Often times the leads generated for subscribing agents are low quality and/or non responsive.
• “Zillow-surfing” is a new a term used for the uprising in non-committal home browsing in 2020.
• The cost of being a subscribing agent is high.
• Agents have to spend a lot of money to get their own listing leads.
• Listings will often have multiple realtors attached, which is confusing to potential buyers.
• Premier Agents get a WordPress website, but WordPress does not integrate with the MLS.
• Zillow is losing profits, they hit their group revenue peak in 2019 and have been declining since with a loss of $101 million after expenses in 2022.