Zillow lays off 2,000 employees

[mysteriouswife]

Nov 4, 2021 21:35:30 GMT -5 cherry1111 said:

A house that is the same floor plan as mine is being sold by Zillow in my neighborhood. Where I am in the north Dallas suburbs houses don’t last more than a weekend on the market. When I saw this one pop up for sale for over $50k more than I think it’s worth I laughed. And it has sat on the market for weeks now. And looking at the pictures they barely did anything to “flip” it. Much of it is late 90s builder original. They’ve dropped the price by about $20k now but it still just sits. I wonder how much they overpaid the sellers for it!

Oh I’m interested too. If you think about it, report back when it does sell.

[edwardo123]

Nov 4, 2021 21:39:29 GMT -5 mysteriouswife said:

Nov 4, 2021 21:35:30 GMT -5 cherry1111 said:

A house that is the same floor plan as mine is being sold by Zillow in my neighborhood. Where I am in the north Dallas suburbs houses don’t last more than a weekend on the market. When I saw this one pop up for sale for over $50k more than I think it’s worth I laughed. And it has sat on the market for weeks now. And looking at the pictures they barely did anything to “flip” it. Much of it is late 90s builder original. They’ve dropped the price by about $20k now but it still just sits. I wonder how much they overpaid the sellers for it!

Oh I’m interested too. If you think about it, report back when it does sell.

We sold our house to Zillow in May. It was on a busy road and needed updating. They offered us a decent amount, so we took it and are renting nearby. They did nothing to our old house and tried to sell it. It just sold last week for $30,000 less than we got from Zillow in May.

[aprilsails]

Nov 6, 2021 10:28:38 GMT -5 edwardo123 said:

Nov 4, 2021 21:39:29 GMT -5 mysteriouswife said:

Oh I’m interested too. If you think about it, report back when it does sell.

We sold our house to Zillow in May. It was on a busy road and needed updating. They offered us a decent amount, so we took it and are renting nearby. They did nothing to our old house and tried to sell it. It just sold last week for $30,000 less than we got from Zillow in May.

Oh wow obviously that business model is not working out well for them.

[sonrisa]

Nov 4, 2021 17:44:38 GMT -5 litebright said:

Nov 4, 2021 13:33:34 GMT -5 ellipses84 said:

No, this is similar to what WeWork tried to do for private offices. This was one line of Zillow’s business. They tried to act like a start up to undercut the market which can work if they can hang on long enough but the timing was off and they started hemorrhaging money so they decided to give up. This will be better for the traditional real estate industry that doesn’t have to compete with them. I only saw this as advantageous to sellers who needed to sell quick, and Zillow if prices continued to skyrocket. The houses that haven’t sold will probably be sold off to rental companies, which there is a shortage of because lots of private owners sold during the pandemic to make $$$.

Also, I don’t think they accounted enough for the things you can’t easily understand from photos, like location. I’m always looking at real estate in my neighborhood and every house Zillow bought in the past few months was in a bad location on a very busy street and not as nice as the competition, so of course they weren’t going to get the same asking prices, and all of them have dropped the price multiple times. Our SoCal housing market is dropping a little but I don’t think it will return to 2017 lows.

My realtor friend said Zillow saved money by providing some services in house but they weren’t fully transitioned to in-house yet so they were having to pay other companies for services.

I agree with so much of this. IMO there are things, a lot of them IRL/infrastructure-based, that simply don't scale, and for some reason tech CEOs seem to either forget or not realize this. Flipping is one of them -- there's just too much variation in individual markets, in the exact factors of a given house (location, repairs that it needs, schools, the cost/effort/time it will take to get it sellable, etc. 

Real estate is a business that requires others to cooperate with you. Tech companies trying to outcompete local alternatives run into trouble when they need cooperation from those local alternatives. To sell a house you need a buyer and all of those buyers aren't going to come from Zillow alone. You need good will with the local agents so they suggest your house or a listing so stunning buyers are unilaterally asking to see it. If not, you have to be better enough than anything out there or at a better price point to overcome lack luster local agent interest. I'm sure my market isn't the only one doing it's best to ignore Redfin and Zillow listings.