Real Estate Investing: How To Survive ‘GodZillow’
Watch out real estate investors - the Z Apocalypse is here. Zillow has announced major expansion plans and advances into new sectors of the industry. How can real estate investors prep, survive and thrive?
Zillow’s New Moves
If you thought Zillow was already a pain for standing out online and the deals it wrecks with its seriously flawed Zestimates tool, that’s just the beginning.
Zillow recently attracted a lot of attention for taking over a large mortgage lender. Now it aims to capture and capitalize on real estate sales and listings and do all the financing for regular home buyers.
More importantly for investors, Zillow has also begun buying and selling properties itself. Like OpenDoor and so many wholesalers out there. It wants to list ‘em, buy ‘em, flip them and finance them.
Plus, the online giant has announced it will be offering property management and rental property services. It will act as the consumer facing portal for rental applications and approvals and processing rental payments.
Essentially Zillow is stepping on a whole lot of toes at once. All of these new revenue streams could create even more capital to expand its online monopoly in an attempt to starve smaller players out of the business.
What To Do
Obviously solo investors and small businesses are at a disadvantage in many ways. They don’t have a Zillow size marketing budget or giant team of sales staff to follow up with leads and cold call. Like Facebook, Zillow has also used all the content and links from users against them. Anyone who contributed to Zillow’s blogs, forums or credited it for data and research on their own blog, or used the site for their reviews, essentially gave away their own future business to the competition.
Fortunately, you do have some advantages to wield too. You can insist on running a very lean and highly flexible business that has better profit margins and can take advantage of market trends and new opportunities faster than Zillow.
You can stand out with your own personal brand and stay unique. You can specialize in being the expert in one niche, or become the local expert.
You can do far better at building personal relationships and providing superior personal service. You can provide more accurate information, follow up better, and conduct more targeted marketing.
Maybe you can even wholesale your properties to Zillow?
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