I agree, there just ISN’T that many people who search or need to talk about real estate every month. On the flip side, we decided to create a “social network” ( I use that term very loose) for agents, buyers, and businesses to create profiles, search and connect. It’s something Trulia, Zillow and others are not doing, a first in the market.

Since TC probably never do a feature article on us, I’ll use these comments to keep updates.

Purely based on traffic though, Techcrunch must be worth 300M+ as its more than double the traffic

There’s nothing wrong with Zillow’s product or strategy – I think they are executing pretty well. The problem is the actual size of the market. I just don’t think there’s that many people that need to check their home’s valuation or talk real estate every single month. The problem that most real estate sites face is that the average user is interested in real estate information only during the buying or selling process, which is generally a very limited period of time. So what happens is that real estate sites keep having to find new users, rather than being able to rely on return visits. Another $30M in capital is not going to change that reality.

#19 Andrew – 4.4M unique users – not page views.

Very well said. Without question I think the real estate structure (sales) structure has finally begun to change. The missing piece I don’t see is a “third party network” that can help close these deals. Any ideas?

Whether they make it or not (like others, I wonder why they need $87M), they are opening up the historically insular real estate sales industry. Craiglist and Zillow are definitely changing this industry.

Also, you can’t discount the team. These are the folks that created Expedia.

At best, they will be an impressive force in real estate. At worst, they will be the Tivo of real estate: the company that changed the way people think about something, but has never been able to capitalize on that innovation.

I wrote a little more about it a while back.

http://www.guil...nging-the-game/

My main point: “As Zillow’s popularity (and functionality) increases, they are putting more and more pressure on real estate brokers to deliver exceptional service and insight.”

anyways 4K per month is 620K per month in wages. Add to that all other little stuff like servers etc, and they probably burn through 2 mil a month…but probably the number is 2.5 mil, which would explain them taking in 30 mil, which at that rate would equal 1 year of operations

At 1 penny per view that their rate is thats: $88,000 per month.

Now someone mentioned 155 employees….lets say the average is $50K a year(developers offset by call center people), so thats about 4K a month per person. Which means they spend

The old axiom is that you get funding/loans/cash infusion when capital is available and when you DO NOT need it at the moment.

If the folks at Zillow can truly execute their business model then 87 million in VC funds wont devalue their ownership in the long run. They really seem to have a high powered executive team and with Zillow being in Seattle (which I think is a very good location) you wont neccassarily hear about them in the news every day as if they were in the Bay Area.

Michael, you actually made an interesting point about Legg Mason. Just last week Legg Mason led Sermo’s Series C round. (Series B was only in January ‘07)

You should do a story on Sermo, if you have not already done so. Very interesting model

Any idea on:

Revenue?
Valuation?

Zillow – it is 2007, not 1997. You exist to make money. What are your revenues at least? 4.4 million unique visitors, 155 employees, etc is nice, but share the REAL metric: CASH GENERATION

Maybe I’m just being naive – or a capitalist pig…