One last thought before next week.
Remember back in 1993 when NAR President Bill Chee issued his famous rally cry that “there were hungry lions coming over the hill“? His speech foretold the impact of technonlogy and “non-industry competitors”. At the time everyone was afraid of Microsoft. A lot came out of that speech, you could argue that was the beginning of Realtor.com.
So flash forward to 2011 and Zillow just completed their IPO. Their market cap is 3 times of Move, Inc. (Realtor.com parent company) and combined with their Yahoo partnership they now trade spots for the most real estate traffic online.
The lion is here baby. He just came from down from Seattle, not Redmond.
UPDATE: [Matt Carter’s recent article on Inman News “Third-party site rule the real estate roost” make my point even stronger.
I don’t think Zillow (or any other such site) is a lion. These portals individually have 6% online market share max, and if you look for percent of total effective marketing market-share (multiply by the 36% that actually found their home online) – that’s just over 2%. That’s not so impressive. So, something has come over the hill but it’s not much of a lion. Of course, *now* people are now providing capital to these portals in amounts that could change things in a hurry.
Greg – one more thing: Do you not think the Zillow stock price will correct to reflect earnings and other fundamentals at some point?