Paul, in Zillow's defense, nearly every real estate website sees that sort of June-December traffic. January first is the spike that kicks off the year, traffic is high until June-July, then it starts trickling downwards through the end of December. Here's Google's search traffic for real estate: http://www.google.com/trends?q=real+estate&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2006&sort=0

So, if traffic to a real estate site is flat, it can look like it's dropping. Still, not a fantastic sign.

I suspect many people are less than enthusiatic about checking local real estate values right now ...

Zillow just looks second rate next to Trulia now. No connection on my part. You can get a good ballpark on price at Trulia with recent homes shown, which is probably as close to reality as a Zestimate.

Andy

Homeowners haven't really caught on to Zillow as most people in the blogosphere might think. They need to market better to the "I don't have time to read blogs" crowd.

Hi, it's David from Zillow,

Galen's right about seasonality within RE and the fact that the sector's down overall due to the slowing of the RE market but the real story here is that Quantcast's data for Zillow traffic is horribly inaccurate.

Josh Jaffe's done a good job of explaining this further: http://www.techconfidential.com/vc-ratings/zillow-in-trouble-maybe-but-no.php

Paul; why didn't you bother to check the other traffic metrics?

Zillow was never terribly accurate. Additionally, even real estate agents who could report accurate information, had a really hard time in doing so.

My agent friend was the listing agent on a property, but Zillow listed someone else. When she tried to get it changed, it was a huge hassle. She said you couldn't just call them. You had to email. Allegedly, they don't list a phone number at all. Even for agents who have a registered account through zillow.

She pretty much said the site was a joke.

So, it isn't all because the market is flat-lined. It's because the information on the site wasn't terribly useful due to inaccuracy.

"You had to email. Allegedly, they don't list a phone number at all. Even for agents who have a registered account through zillow. "

Let me add - after you finally got someone through email, they would then give you a fax number to fax proof of data.

It wasn't just having to email them that was the hassle. It just takes a long time to get simple information changed.

snark -

Sorry to hear about your friend's frustration. As you can imagine, it's a tricky scenario when one agent claims that another one is listing their property, especially when the first agent won't acknowledge their mistake. Luckily this is a very rare scenario but I am sorry it impacted your friend's experience. As far as I know, none of the free web services offer 800-number support. Most users understand this and the forums we use to support the site are in fact an efficient way for users to get help with issues like this.

I heard from someone on their team last Friday they had just announced a hiring freeze -- internally only.

Also, WRT traffic -- Alexa actually shows they've been in a freefall since they started! (not that it's any more accurate)

Spencer, CFO of Zillow here.

Paul,
As my colleague DavidG points out above, traffic estimates from these types of sources are notoriously unreliable. We (like most web publishers) find alexa, compete and quantcast to be totally inconsistent with our internal traffic data (which comes from Omniture). Our internal numbers show Zillow traffic up 10-20% year over year for each of the last few months, a trend which we're particularly proud of given the slower housing climate. We're very proud of our y-o-y growth, and of the absolute visitor numbers (about 4-5M UU per month). In addition, our traffic sources are very encouraging: about 75% of our visitors type in "Zillow" to a browser, 10% type "Zillow" into a search engine, 5% come from SEO, 5% from online partnerships and 5% from links on blogs. In other words: 100% of our traffic is free. Not bad, considering that we're among the top 5 real estate sites on the web (according to Nielsen, Comscore, Hitwise, and pretty much every source).

Jordan,
No we didn't announce a hiring freeze. Zillow is still hiring. We've grown from 5 people to 165 people in about 2 years though, so as we went through our 2008 budgeting process we decided to grow much more slowly and very deliberately going forward. We're almost right-sized as a company, so we don't need to add staff nearly as quickly in '08 as we did in 2007 or 2006.

I've had the same frustrating experience with Zillow customer service. Zillow had incorrectly listed a number of my former Brokerages listings and it took over a month to get someone to respond to the faxes I was sending. It took a nasty gram to finally get a human to contact me to listen to the situation so they could resolve it.
My question to Zillow is if they have 165 employees why not offer a phone number or customer service department? Adding 2 additional employee would remove the frustrations from Zillows mistakes.

If you have a truly custom home with tons of upgrades , added fireplaces etc. you sure won't find it on Zillow. They also list things that are incorrect , ie the number of bedrooms fireplaces, et.If you have an acerage propery , set up for horses , noo way they can't state this! . This site is an absolute scam . They never even update their info. ie my home was taken off market Oct 5th , still on Zillow with a 212 days on market flag. why don't these folks go out + get a REAL job . They couldn't , because if they made mistakes , they'd be accountable. These young folks today, computer geeks, want noo part of that.

Zillow is in trouble, period. Why else would the CFO be on forums commenting about the stability and growth of the company. They are now in scramble mode as their nearly 100MM VC raise is gushing from their coffers.

Let's use their numbers for our analysis. Even with 5MM UU a month, an Ad sell through rate of 70%, average in 12 page-views a visit and an unrealistic $10 CPM they are only pulling down 420k a month. The reality of their CPM is probably closer to 4-5 dollar range (which is still high considering a ~$2.40 average), but we're giving them the benefit of the doubt.

That sounds like a lot, but take into consideration that their payroll on 165 employees well exceeds that, and the office space needed to house that many people may be half that amount yearly. Add in operations, hardware, marketing and you have a company scrambling.

Not to mention, how many sites with an "advertising only" revenue model exist today?
(hint, not even Google is in that category anymore)

I wish them the best, but I think this is very reminiscent of web 1.0 where they spent too much money, too fast going in the wrong direction and they may not have enough left over to scale back and correct their missteps.

The biggest problem with Zillow is the complete inability to get them to fix inaccurate information in a timely manner. For example, I have a house that was taken off the market months ago, but Zillow cant stop the auto load that keeps showing it for sale. A recently sold price is wrong on my proerty(as in it never was sold, just manually entered) and I have been trying to have that removed for 4 YES 4 months and Zillow keeps saying it is technically complicated to removed. 4 MONTHS? Sounds like they are technically incompetent. So the real problem with Zillow is their poor customer service and complete inability to correct information in a timely manner.