Housing Bubble Be Damned: Zillow To Co-Brand 180 Newspaper Real Estate Sites
This story was written by David Kaplan.
Along with help wanted, newspapers' classified revenues have suffered greatly on the decline in real estate ads. While it's not likely to turn those fortunes around, 180 newspapers have agreed to create co-branded real estate sites with Zillow.com. The deal, which includes newspaper sites such as The Tampa Tribune, Richmond Times-Dispatch and Winston-Salem Journal, represents an extension Zillow.com's year-and-a-half-old real estate ad network and newspaper consortium.
The newspaper sites will feature Zillow's search tools, which lets users examine any home address, neighborhood or locality and find home values, recently sold homes, homes for sale, open house listings and local market data. The sites will also connect to Zillow's real estate community content via Zillow Advice, as well as mortgage rates. The narrow focus of the Zillow offeringespecially considering that home prices have been plummeting the past yearwill make it difficult to emulate the wider success members of the more general Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Newspaper Consortium have been claiming lately. But given the struggles newspapers are going through to attract ad dollars, every little bit helps and when the housing market rebounds, Zillow's members might avoid having to play catch-up. Release
By David Kaplan