Zillow is officially buying and selling homes in San Diego, the 17th market for its 17-month old iBuyer platform Zillow Offers.
In San Diego, Zillow will go toe-to-toe with Redfin, the only other company that currently has an iBuyer presence in the city.
“Sellers who sell their home to Zillow love the flexibility, convenience and certainty of selling to a company they already know and trust,” Zillow Brand President Jeremy Wacksman said in a statement. “We are on a mission to transform real estate, and with our San Diego launch today we are one step closer to delivering a seamless transaction experience to home buyers and sellers across the country.”
Zillow Offers has scaled quickly, launching at least one new market per month with a total of 26 expected by 2020. In the second quarter of 2018, the company sold 786 homes, nearly twice as many as in the first quarter, while purchasing 1,535 homes, an increase of 71 percent.
Despite the precipitous scaling, Zillow is still losing money on each home it buys and subsequently sells, on average. However, that number is trending in a positive direction.
Through Zillow Offers, homeowners can request a preliminary all-cash offer through Zillow within 48 hours of uploading pertinent information about their home on Zillow’s website. If a homeowner accepts Zillow’s offer, he or she will have the opportunity to choose the moving date and closing date – from five to 90 days. Zillow then undertakes some light renovation work – an estimated $12,066 per home in the second quarter – and preps the home for sale.
Buyers who opt to purchase a home through Zillow can also get a mortgage through the company’s lending arm, which recently announced key hires in its effort to build a proprietary mortgage platform and scale up alongside the buying and selling program.
San Diego is a unique market for one of the nation’s top iBuyers. RedfinNow poses the only top competition, although according to a new map from Remaine and Mike DelPrete, not a single home has been sold to an iBuyer in San Diego through June 30, 2019.
Zillow, in a release, cited San Diego’s large military population as a reason for its expansion, saying that they can help manage the already-stressful moving process, which can be even more complicated for military personnel.
As it has in every other market, Zillow will work with a local brokerage to represent it on both sides of the transaction. If the homeseller opts not to take Zillow’s offer, the seller lead will be sent one of Zillow’s Premier Agent customers.
