LandThink Community: Zillow - LandThink Community

Land Agents,

If you use Zillow and it works for you then ignore this post. If you don't use Zillow you might take a moment to go and see how your listings appear on the website and then decide from there.

I sent an inquiry to Zillow to have our listing deleted from the site. Instead of a prompt customer service response instead all I started getting was a twice daily sales call. Our experience with Zillow for "vacant" land properties (no home whatsoever) is utterly and completely awful. Zillow only works for actual address properties and does not recognize generic corner descriptions and the mapping gets all jumbled up and they will map them all over the place usually in the wrong town and some cases the wrong state.

We receive calls from some of the most frustrated and annoyed buyers when one of our listings gets erroneously fed to Zillow because they are so exhausted by the time they finally find us after wading through links to agents that can't help them. We take great effort to keep our listings off Zillow because when you have a listing in an area - your contact information will rotate onto other listing pages and show up in a box that Zillow calls the "Contact a Buyers Agent" which implies that those agents would know about the listing. These boxes are never the same when you click on the listing. This is terrible because you have no control where your contact information is being placed. For example, ours rotated to a residential property in an area that we do not service. Zillow also makes it appear that you are the listing agent so we then in turn get calls from other agents asking to setup showings on listings that are not even ours.

I finally got a truthful reply today from Zillow and his exact words were.... "We don't want to sell advertising to land agents" My thought was that's great - wish you would have taken the whole 3 seconds to click on our website and find that out first before you called us incessantly and ignored our requests to delete listings. Once again we have asked for our listings to be deleted and we have also asked for our entire profile to be deleted. Some may disagree with that but in our experience not all sites are worth the effort.

If Zillow works for you and the leads are actually legitimate then my best wishes to you but if you sell land exclusively (no homes) then you may want to consider stopping your listing feeds to Zillow. Good luck.