Zillow, a popular real-estate listings site, recently tweaked the pricing model in its marketplace for mortgages, angering many of the lenders who pay Zillow for customer leads. A few weeks ago, the site announced that it will be introducing a new pricing model for these leads to lenders.

Zillow’s mortgage marketplace, which launched in 2008, lets borrowers submit loan requests for mortgages and then review quotes provided by lenders. Basically, lenders will be able to submit any number of loan quotes for free, but will be required to pay Zillow a “market-priced fee” when any borrowers contact them regarding their quotes. When a contact is made, the lender will be charged a market-priced fee.

Zillow insists that “the market” will determine the price for each contact and it will not be setting the price itself, but rather it seems to be based on how much each lender is willing to pay for a lead. The company did warn lenders that Zillow contacts are more valuable than Google clicks for mortgage keywords, which typically range from $7-$25. Each Zillow lead is can be anywhere from $1 to $100, with lenders able to set a maximum price to pay per contact. Lenders will also be required to pre-fund their Zillow accounts with a minimum of $250 so Zillow can automatically deduct the price of the lead from the lender’s account.

On the site’s forums, it’s apparent that lenders are not happy with the new system. First, lenders are angered because they are now not allowed to list contact phone numbers or link to any of their contact systems, because Zillow needs a way to monitor whether the lender does in fact get a lead. Zillow will post a 1-800 phone number for each lender, which is actually forwarded to the lender’s actual phone number. Zillow records any calls made from a borrower to a lender to make sure leads are accurate (which works in the lender’s favor but is a little sketchy, as some lenders point out). The first phase of the new system rolled out a few days ago and already lenders are complaining of disconnected calls.

And of course lenders are frustrated by the fact that Zillow is even implementing a fee in the first place, when the site has long been known as a free and open marketplace for both lenders and buyers. Apparently realtors on the site, who often get leads from advice forums, aren’t being charged for their customer contacts (yet).

The change in policy is interesting considering the fact that a few months ago, Zillow’s CEO and co-founder Richard Barton told CNET that Zillow is growing, despite the credit crunch and implosion of the real-estate industry, because the site “doesn’t try to over-monetize.” But in its message to lenders, Zillow said the free marketplace that was launched in April 2008 was an “experiment” to determine if the site could connect borrowers with lenders. The project worked and Zillow is currently seeing borrowers filing an average of 50,000 loan requests per month, with thousands of lenders helping to fund and close these loans.

Nothing stays free forever.

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The economy is in the hole, and real estate is in an even deeper hole. What better time to invest in a real estate search engine? Shasta Ventures just led an $8 million series B financing in Roost, a real-estate search engine that is grabbing data from MLS listings (actually from something called the IDX, or Internet Data Exchange, which is a close proxy to MLS listings).

As a result, Roost claims to have more comprehensive and accurate listings in the cities it covers than competing real-estate search engines such as Trulia and Zillow. Roost offers 3.1 million listings in about 30 major metro areas.

Yet Roost’s traffic barely registers. It is much smaller than Trulia, Zillow, or Redfin (which I’ve charted as a comparison below because Redfin also is not yet nationwide). Roost was late to market, so it is a bit surprising that it was able to raise a second round in this environment. Direct access to the MLS listings is an advantage, but is it enough to get Roost over the hump?

Roost raised 5.5 million last January from General Catalyst Partners, the Cross Country Group and Geolo Capital. They all participated in the current round as well. Roost also just added foreclosure listings from First American CoreLogic, a pretty common feature on real-estate sites.

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But they don’t hate it so much that they won’t compete.

MRIS is launching a beta version of a service called HomesDatabase that shows MLS listings. For now only homes covered in their region are shown, but they hope to partner with the other MLS systems to create a complete database covering the U.S.

They say they’ll compete with better and more up to date information. They can ensure this by simply restricting the data they release to third parties. Since they’re a geographic monopoly, that’s trivial.

MRIS CEO David Charron says “if you listen to the consumer, everybody wins.” But one thing they’ve left off the site are for-sale-by-owner listings, which cannot be mixed with MLS listings. Until that rule is abandoned, brokers and agents still have a ridiculous advantage over people who sell their homes directly.

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The layoff train continues: Zillow CEO

Richard’s blog post:

This week we are reducing our workforce by 25%. This was an incredibly painful decision for me and the leadership team, but, in the end, we concluded that we had no choice but to securely batten down the hatches as we sail into a major economic storm.

The unprecedented economic events that are playing out on a global stage began in our own industry and have made a prolonged recession likely, in our judgment. We are a young company that is not yet making a profit. Despite having sizeable cash reserves, we deemed the responsible course was to meaningfully reduce expenses, so that Zillow emerges from the other side of the recession in a very strong position, even if the recession lasts many years.

Saying goodbye to dedicated colleagues, who we have worked with side by side, is miserable. This is a group of incredibly smart and talented people who helped build and support a product they can be proud of. I want to thank these folks for their service and contributions and offer my apology for the having to make this decision. I wish the circumstances would allow us to continue having them contribute to Zillow’s success.

One of the reasons this is so difficult is simply because the business continues grow. In the midst of the madness that surrounds us, we counted 5.4 million unique visitors to Zillow.com in September, which was a 42% increase in traffic over this time last year. Fear, value-shopping, and curiosity are driving people in record volumes to our site. The fact that we have never spent any money on advertising gives me tremendous confidence in our consumer-centric product vision and in the long-term leverage in our business model (free, open access funded by targeted, relevant advertising). While our revenues do not yet cover our expenses, those revenues have been growing at a rapid pace and we will continue to have open positions in areas that are directly tied to revenue, such as advertising salespeople.

So, this is a jolting and sad week for us here at Zillow – both for departing employees and those of us who will be adapting to a smaller organization. However, given the potential for an extended recession, we firmly believe that we are doing what is painful but necessary to ensure a bright long-term future for a company that, in a very short period of time, has become an important resource and a household name for all those interested in homes.

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But just how comprehensive are these sites, and how accurate are their listings? Trulia offers 3.5 million listings nationwide, and Zillow has 3.1 million. But people look for houses in local markets, not nationwide. What matters is comprehensiveness withing local market

A few hours after I put up that post, I heard from Roost, a competitor to both Trulia and Zillow (with only 1.4 million listings in the markets it covers) that differentiates itself by getting its data directly from the same Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) that real estate brokers use. They just happened to have study in their back pocket (which they commissioned and paid for) that compares the “accuracy” of search results in three cities (Dallas, Miami, and San Diego) across different real-estate search services (Roost, Zillow, Trulia, Yahoo, and Google). The study, which was done by real-estate industry consultants the WAV Group, defines accuracy as the percentage of listing results that match listings the MLS for that city.

The results are in the chart above and, not surprisingly, Roost comes out looking great. For each city, it returns between 95 and 99 percent of the listings in the MLS. Trulia’s accuracy in the study ranges between a pitiful 9 percent for San Diego to 61 percent for Miami. (Zillow generally does worse across the board, with its accuracy ranging between 12 percent and 36 percent across the three cities).

Trulia disputes these results. Heather Fernandez, vice president of marketing, says:

The data looks very questionable, and not in line with our internal coverage data. Our data shows that we have roughly 70% coverage in most major metros.

And indeed, if you do a search for homes for sale in San Diego on Trulia, you get 4,395 results, compared to 6,036 on Roost. That’s 73 percent. (Zillow claims 7,661 listings in the San Diego city limits). Even if half of them are stale listings or not accurate in some other way, it’s hard to get to the 9 percent that the Roost-financed study claims. That’s because for some reason, the WAV study only compared homes in each city with exactly 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, within a $50,000 price range.

That methodology seems random and flawed to me. Would Trulia’s accuracy be greater if the study had looked at homes in San Diego that cost $400,000 to $450,000 instead of $300,000 to $350,000? Comprehensiveness would have been a virtue in the study’s methodology as well as in what it was trying to measure.

Still 70 percent accuracy is not that great, and it doesn’t seem like Zillow is any better. If the MLS in any given city is the benchmark, both have a lot of work to do. And Trulia, for one, is striking deals with different MLSs to incorporate their data. But it only has 14 so far, out of about 900 nationwide. MLS-based sites like Roost and Redfin may have more listings in the markets they serve, but they don’t serve every market yet. For instance, in San Diego, Redfin tracks 6,300 homes for sale, better even than Roost. Yet neither has any listings in New York, and Redfin only has 473,000 listings total.

Yet Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman also balked at my earlier suggestion that either Trulia or Zillow are even close to comprehensive within any given market. In an e-mail to me, he said:

What got me was that almost any real estate site has more homes for sale than Trulia or Zillow.

Frenandez doesn’t think that having the most listings matters. She responds:

Listings are commoditized –there are dozens of sites that offer basic listing information in every city across the country. It’s not a competitive advantage for an Internet company.

What is more important, she says, is the filtering the site allows home buyers to do to help them make an informed decision. I’d say it’s both. Those filtering tools (heat maps, sales comps, local school info) are also becoming commodities. You want to cast your net as wide as possible before you filter down so you don’t miss out on that one house that fits all of your criteria.

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Zillow, the site where you can find pricing estimates and other info about houses around the United States, aims to disrupt the online lending market with the launch of its Mortgage Marketplace.

The marketplace is a free service that hooks lenders up with borrowers. It works very much as Zicasso does for travelers (see our review of that service here). Borrowers submit just the essentials – what type of loan they need, where they’re located, their estimated property value, their credit history, etc – without divulging any of their contact info. Then certified lenders make offers that can be compared side-by-side. It’s up to the borrower to reach out and contact those lenders, not the other way around as it is with services like Lending Tree.

Zillow cites a Harris Interactive study showing that it’s more important for borrowers to keep their contact info private than to find the best rates. Apparently lenders are a bit too eager to sell you on a deal after they know how to find you. So the main advantage of this marketplace lies in protecting borrowers’ identities and tipping the balance of power into their favor.

There are other advantages to the system as well. Borrowers can rate lenders and leave comments about them so that others can make better decisions. The extra transparency also lets lenders know what types of offers they are competing with, which could lead to more competitive deals. That’s okay with lenders, though, since they’re gaining access to a larger market for which to make their offers.

According to the company, Zillow attracts about 5M unique visitors monthly, 1/5 of which are looking for a loan and 2/3 of which are looking to buy or sell a home. We’ve also been told that 1 in 3 professional lenders visit Zillow every month. This traffic is therefore a natural fit for a service like this, which shouldn’t have a problem gaining traction.

Some other fun facts about Zillow: of the 90m homes in the US, 80M are listed in Zillow and 70M have estimated prices (”zestimates”). A full 45% of the 90M total homes have been looked up on the site; in San Francisco that percentage is around 90%.

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Dow Jones VentureSource put out some data on Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. earlier this week that I’ve put together into these charts. The first one above shows how much money has been invested in Web 2.0 startups so far this decade. In 2007, venture capital poured into Web 2.0 companies at a record pace—$1.34 billion. That was up 88 percent from the $716 million invested in 2006.

But did Web 2.0 deals peak last year? Take out the $300 million raised by Facebook, and the amount invested was up only 46 percent, a marked slowdown from the 132 percent dollar growth the year before. (The amounts charted above, starting with 2001, are $68 million, $29 million, $79 million, $232 million, $716 million, and $1.343 billion)

The growth in the number of deals is also slowing. Last year, there were 178 Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. That was up only 25 percent, after doubling every year for the previous four years. And in Silicon Valley last year, the number of deals actually dropped from 74 to 69.

In 2007, the median deal size was $5 million, up 22 percent. And the median pre-money valuation was $10 million, up 66 percent (from $6 million in 2006). Both deal size and valuation for Web 2.0 companies remained below the average VC deal across all industries ($7.6 million and $16 million, respectively)

Here is a list of some of the biggest venture financings of 2007, including ones for Facebook, Ning, Zillow, Veoh, MyStrands, and Hi5. Slide’s $50 million isn’t included because that was in 2008. Hey, maybe things haven’t peaked after all.

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And while he isn’t an investor in Seattle-based real estate startup Redfin, I’m pretty sure he likes their business model. The company is doing its best to completely remove real estate agents and brokers (and their absurd fees) from at least half of a home sale. If you use them when you buy a home, they reimburse 2/3 of the broker fee to you, keeping 1/3 for themselves.

60 Minutes covered the company last May, which led to a surge in business. CEO Glenn Kelman told me today that, since launching in February 2006, they’ve been involved in 1,500 transactions and have reimbursed $12 million to customers. The average refund is $10,000. The company had 2007 revenues of $5 million, he says.

They’ve just launched a new version of the website that includes more frequent MLS updates and the ability to group home sales by neighborhood and download the data. They are also providing deeper data on homes currently on the market as well as historical sales (they compete with a number of other startups in search, including Zillow, Trulia and Roost).

If you want to use Redfin, check first to make sure they cover your geographic area, which include the San Francisco/Bay Area, San Diego, Orange County, LA, Seattle, Washington DC/Baltimore, and Boston. Chicago is coming soon.

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I gave Frink a hard time because I always find the Zestimates for properties in New York City to be way off base. “New York is tough,” he admitted. But Zillow has tweaked its algorithm and improved the accuracy of its Zestimates by 12 percent (as measured by the actual sale price versus the last Zestimate on the day of the sale).

The algorithm improved by diving deeper into the data. “We went from having a model for each county to 20 models for each county,” says Frink. The Zestimates also now take into account more than one million corrections and facts added by home owners. The margin of error is now 8.8 percent. That is an average for the entire country. You still can’t trust the Zestimates on New York City apartments. But Frink notes that a third of the site’s Zestimates across the country fall within five percent of the selling price, and that half are within 10 percent. Still, he cautions that “the Zestimate is just a starting point.”

You’d think that real-estate sites would be hurting right now, given the severe correction in the housing market. But Frink argues that in a down market research is more important than ever and says that Zillow is still benefiting from the overall shift in real estate activities to the Web. Zillow’s ad model certainly benefits from various targeting capabilities-geographic, demographic, and behavioral. Each action on the site is zipcode-specific. Frink notes that the EZ Ads Zillow sells itself go for $10 CPMs, versus $3 to $5 CPMs for backfill ads from ad networks.

Zillow is trying to create a database of all homes in the U.S., which is a different approach than other real-estate sites. “It is the database of all homes, not just homes on the market,” notes Frink. This is both a strength and a weakness. On the downside, Zillow lists only 400,000 homes that are for sale, out of about 4 million nationwide. A deal with real-estate publisher Network Communications will bring that total to 900,000. Trulia, in comparison, has 2 million.

On the upside, Zillow has a lot more comparable data than most sites. (Although, I think Cyberhomes has better data). And since Zillow lists all existing homes, it makes it easy to provisionally put your house on the market through its “Make Me Move” feature. About 100,000 Make-Me-Move homes are on the site. And in some markets, it is a pretty significant number. For instance, in Seattle (where Zillow is based), there are 30,000 homes officially for sale and another 6,000 Make-Me-Move listings, or 20 percent of the number on the market.

The other big news is that Zillow is joining Yahoo Real Estate, Trulia, Oodle, Homes.com, Realestate.com, Vast.com and others in adopting a standard way for brokers and multiple listings services (MLSs) to send in their real estate listings in a feed format. That way brokers can use the same data format for all the different real estate search engines and Websites. It is called the Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS). [Correction: RETS is actually a different, pre-existing, standard that the new listing feed standard will interoperate with]. That should make it easier for brokers to propagate their listings everywhere.

Zillow claims 4 million monthly unique visitors. Comscore shows 1.4 million in December, and that’s been flat for the past year. Trulia, though, looks like it just passed Zillow with 1.6 million.

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Zillow continues to make big traffic gains, too. The company, which now has 155 employees, had 4.4 million unique visitors in August 2007 according to the company (Comscore says 1.9 million uniques and 38 million page views). They have 70 million U.S. homes in their database. They say more than 50,000 questions have been asked by users since a Q&A service was launched in April 2007.

Legg Mason certainly seems bullish on consumer facing web services – In addition to this round, they recently led Ning’s July 2007 $44 million venture round.

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They may have been taking a look at the runaway success of Yahoo Answers – Among the changes is a new product called Home Q&A, which allows users to ask and answer questions about any of the 70 million U.S. homes in the Zillow database. Answers are rated by other Zillow users.

Every home in the Zillow database has its own dedicated page. Any user can now also add photos and information about any home and its neighborhood to the site. Users can also indicate if a home is for sale, and the asking price, as well as additional information. This is an expansion on user-generated content features added last September. Previously only the 600,000 registered users who claimed their homes or over 150,000 real estate agents could list a home for sale or post photos of the home. Now any registered user can list a home for sale and post an unlimited number of photos for the home, although the prime real estate on the listing is still reserved for a certified owner or agent. Bad photos and information can be flagged by other users.

Zillow is moving beyond the general site wide advertising they got from brokerages and home improvement stores, enabling registered users to carry out targeted advertising campaigns for their home listing. The new ad units are called “EZ Ads”. Users will be able to target their campaign by zip codes and specify the number of view or bank roll their ad will run for. The effective CPM for these ads will be a penny per impression.

Zillow claims 4.1 million unique visitors came to the site in March (Comscore (U.S.) says 1.8 million, down from 2.3 million a year ago, and 33 million monthly page views). They say that 90% of visitors own a home, and 54% play to buy or sell in the next two years. The company has raised $57 million in venture capital.

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“What number would it take for you to call the movers and hand over your keys?” said Lloyd Frink, Zillow’s co-founder and president, in a release about the new function. “Make Me Move is our twist on the traditional ‘For Sale’ sign.”

A homeowner can post a Make Me Move price without exposing any personal information. Zillow then enables interested buyers to contact the owner through an email “anonymizer.” The service is free.

Free is the magic word at Zillow lately because the company also announced that it will provide free listings for all home owners and realtors. Listings can include photos, and realtors can also create Web sites for each listing.

Zillow’s third new function is the Real Estate Wiki, which has hundreds of articles on buying, selling, financing, or any topic a owner/buyer might need. Wiki visitors can edit or comment on articles, or create new articles.

These new new announcements are undoubtedly Zillow’s efforts to continue hosting as much real estate information on their site as possible. It’s a sign that they have enough traffic to sell ads and do not need user money to survive. The company launched in early 2006 and has made major announcements all year, including 3D maps, open APIs, and many large rounds of funding. The company claimed 3.2 million users and 70 million home listings as of November.

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In addition to its own data, Zillow now includes home information uploaded by home owners.
The site also offers mobile access and a 3-D view of homes based on Microsoft’s “bird’s eye view.” If you haven’t tried entering a few addresses into Zillow before, I recommend doing it for fun if nothing else.

Now third parties will be able to access and incorporate on their web sites either of two data sets, one on home valuations and the other on property details. Use of the APIs is free and users can make 1,000 per day by default. This is a very smart marketing move on Zillow’s part. One of the best ways for small web sites to grow in functionality and sophistication is to offer rich data from off-site integrated into their own offerings. That’s happening with everything from video search to syndicated photographs as well. The move towards highly portable data makes this a very exciting time for small web site publishers, who are more easily than every before able to wrap a feature rich environment around their own core value proposition.

Seattle based Zillow has raised a massive $57 million in venture backing and launched its beta site in February of this year. To go from launch to being one of the major providers of data to top sites in your field in 8 months is impressive. That’s made possible in large part because of Zillow’s executive team, lead by Expedia founder and former CEO Rich Barton and former Expedia senior vice president Lloyd Frink.

Other startups doing similar work include Trulia , RealEstateABC, and Redfin.

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This owner information will appear on an information page about a property along with Zillow gathered information (see screen shot below). If some of the information about a home is incorrect or outdated, users will have the opportunity to correct that. Additional information on valuation can also be included, and Zillow will use that information in determining an updated estimate of the home’s value.Before adding any information users must complete a verification process to claim a home.

I would expect people to be aggressive about updating Zillow information when they put their home up for sale.

Zillow continues to innovate and execute well. They’ve raised a massive $57 million in venture funding to date, and are deeply integrated into Yahoo Real Estate. Our previous posts on Zillow are here.

With the redesign, Yahoo supports finding and listing a house, researching the area (schools and community), finding a realtor, getting a mortgage (with local rates), and valuing your home. This makes for a far more comprehensive site than the price listings Trulia provides, yet doesn’t go as far as Redfin and Movoto by stepping in as the broker (note, however that these last two services are restricted to just a few geographic locations).

The Zillow API is still being developed, although they’ve given some details on the Zillow blog. Yahoo is already using the API, as well as this test site from a company that build sites for agents.

The mobile feature allows you to obtain the value of a house by email/sms. To use it, text or email a home address to z@labs.zillow.com. I agree with SocketSite – Zillow Mobile you no longer have to wait until you get home from a dinner party to figure out how much your host’s house is worth. Another use, of course, is to check home values in a neighborhood when you visit an open house.

Zillow, essentially a mashup of maps and historical real estate sales information, has now raised a whopping $57 million in capital. Other than supporting their 118 employees, it’s unclear what they plan to do with the money. John Cook has good information on Zillow’s recent stats, noting that in June the company had 2.1 million unique visitors, ranking 11th among real estate Web sites.

Note that Jobster, another Seattle startup, has also recently completed a large financing, bringing their total to nearly $50 million raised.

The new site is called Real Estate ABC (which is owned Internet Brands).

The Zillow competitor is in beta on a hidden URL: www1.realestateabc.com/home-values/. I have no idea if they’ll leave it up, but as of right now it’s live.

The name isn’t as cool and the design isn’t a fluid as Zillow, but it may be better in some ways. For instance, Real Estate ABC allows users to adjust property values for a particular property with an Ajax slider. Adjustable property factors include Interior, Exterior, Lot Size, View, Privacy/Noise and Local Market Conditions.

Users can also refine property values by adding or removing comparables directly on the results page. In fact, Real Estate ABC gives significant detail on comparables, including distance from a specific address. Real Estate ABC also provides a mashup with Google maps, although they do not use satellite images like Zillow.

Zillow is perhaps one of the most popular recent mashup to launch. If anything, Real Estate ABC shows that if a mashup site is going to try to make a go at creating a real business, they need to build in proprietary features that are not easily duplicated before the competition arrives.