Many technology companies fail to understand the value of push reporting. WAV Group works with many technology firms to appreciate push vs. pull, but so many fail to grasp the importance. Every broker should pay attention to this example to evaluate how the software licensed in his or her company should leverage push reporting to improve the value. For example, I would love to see data and analytic companies like Terradatum, TrendGraphix, and ShowingTime incorporate this type of push reporting to show market trends, office productivity, and productivity by agent (solds, pending, active). In another example, I would love to see CRM solutions remind and encourage agents to contact their clients, add additional customer records, and promote other sales activities that would coach the activities that lead to agent success. There are many more examples, but lets dissect this email from Zillow.
Zillow Push Report Case Example
Here is an excellent example of push reporting. At some cadence, in this case its weekly, Zillow Group pushes an email to the Realtor® to demonstrate the effectiveness of online property display on their websites. With 4 million or so active listings on the website, you can imagine the volume of emails being pushed out each week.
Here you will notice that Zillow Group is leveraging this email for training too. They are encouraging the Realtor to upload a free video tour of the property. Zillow is well aware that video information inside of property listings provides many benefits. The consumer gets an engaging multimedia experience, which is also great for differentiating and improving search engine optimization by contributing additional content and lengthening time on site.
Zillow Group does not stop there. They insert two additional calls to action. In the wake of Zillow announcing that they will not allow agents to enter listings to their site anymore, one would misconceive that they do not trust agents to enter contextual information that broadens the quality of the listing. But nothing could be further from the truth. What Zillow has learned over a decade of understanding accuracy on their website is that agents will frequently upload properties for sale then forget to update them with new photos, pricing, etc. Zillow Group has transitioned their website to a living database. They have 100% of every parcel in America on the site regardless of its listing status, and have curated more than 450 million property photos. Agents do not need to add property anymore. They simply need to add context to the property that already exists in their database.
To add context to property, they are asking the Realtor to review and confirm the data that they have. You can see the Green Light Bulb icon in this image that invites the Realtor to confirm the home facts and features. Incidentally, this is the same construct that Realtor’s Property Resource ® uses for their living database. CoreLogic also leverages their living database of parcel centric data in Realist® to pre-populate the property facts when a Realtor is adding a new listing to Matrix.
The next call to action is to invite Realtors to drive traffic to Zillow.com. Agents are able to share their property to Facebook, the worlds most heavily visited website. Moreover, the Realtor is likely to forward this email to their client to view a limited example of how the property is being marketed online, perhaps even encouraging the client to also share the property to their friends, family and neighbors who are connected to them on Facebook.
This is a very simple email, that when pushed to the Realtor is likely to ignite many, many activities that appreciate the considerable efforts that Zillow Group does to constantly build and maintain their leadership in the online property search space.
Imagine how the effectiveness of MLS systems could be improved with push reporting that drives agent engagement; for example, push out an email with the Hot Sheet. MLSs could also push out listing engagement from services like Listtrac or Listhub. The Houston Association of REALTORS® does this beautifully, check out this web statistics page https://www.har.com/content/webstats. Imagine if every MLS consumer facing website did the same.
In truth, Realtors® complain about the volume of email that they get every day, but behind that complaint is a more truthful statement. They are really upset with the volume of bad email that they get everyday. I can assure you that agents are not marking this email from Zillow as spam, unsubscribing, or otherwise ignoring it. Its valued, and software firms, brokers, and MLSs should always be trying to deliver that level of value to the Realtor and consumer.
