As of Thursday, homebuilders who are part of Zillow Group’s paid Promoted Communities and Promoted Homes platforms are able to purchase various services to help enhance their listing content at a discounted or pre-negotiated price from one of the 12 vendors in the company’s new Advantage Program.
Zillow Group launched its Promoted Communities advertising program in 2016 as a way of tapping into a revenue stream from high-volume builders who post new-home listings on its websites. Zillow charges builders (or their agents) with 150 or more closings per year to join Promoted Communities in order for their listings to appear.
This allows builders to feed agent-represented listings to sites such as Zillow and Trulia, a change that gave builders more exposure but caused some concern from impacted companies and agents who represent them.
Now, the new Zillow Group Advantage Program, exclusive to the company’s homebuilder customers, will be able to boost their listings with services such as interactive floor and site plans, apps, 3D renderings, virtual tours and web design at discounted rates, according to the company.
“At launch, our builder customers can work with the following vendors across content, CRM, reviews and web development categories at discounted rates: Alpha Vision, Biorev, Chameleon Power, INseARCH Digital Studio, MediaLab, Rendering House, Renoworks, Lasso, Avid Ratings, Builder Designs, O’Neil Interactive, and Rearview Advertising,” the company said in a press release.
“With the Zillow Group Advantage Program, we are able to provide builders access to services that will better their listings and ultimately help them standout from their greatest competition, resale homes,” said Lucy Wohltman, vice president of sales-new construction at Zillow Group, in a statement.
The company has dubbed Advantage as a “builder incentive program.” Asked whether it had created the program in response to customer complaints about having to pay for new-home listing exposure, Zillow did not respond by publication time. We will update this story when we hear back.
“With the Zillow Group Advantage Program, we’re thrilled to be giving our builder customers access to services at discounted rates to improve their listings and content for home shoppers. This provides builders additional value beyond just leads,” a Zillow spokesperson later told Inman.
More information about the program is available here.