How To Get Buyers to Contact You Directly From Your Zillow Listing
Zillow is a powerhouse of a real estate website.
At the time of this post, the website traffic is 39,592,227 /month. Which is HUGE!
What this means for you as a home seller is that you don’t just want to list your house on Zillow, you NEED to list your house on Zillow.
When you purchase one of my flat fee MLS listing plans, we ensure that your MLS listing is syndicated to Zillow.
We are able to do this because of the agreements our real estate brokerage has in place with Zillow.
When we enter your house for sale in the MLS, this creates a data link with Zillow.
So when we make changes to your listing, it gets updated in Zillow the next time the data refreshes. Which is typically in an hour or two but can take up to 24 hours.
This is all a good thing and you want to have your MLS listing and your Zillow listing in sync together to avoid inconsistencies.
And having inconsistencies is what you want to avoid when your home is listed on Zillow because of those 39 million website visitors every month.
Once your house is listed for sale on Zillow after your flat fee MLS listing is live, it will have the MLS Listing Agent’s contact information as well as 3 other real estate agents on the right hand side of the listing.
These other agents pay advertising fees to Zillow to be featured on listings.
This is how it is for every listing on Zillow!
So if a home buyer is interested in your listing, usually they will select all the agents and then the buyers inquiry is emailed to them all.
Once, the MLS listing agent gets this notification, they will forward it to you so that you can follow up with the buyers directly.
However, the other agents will also contact the buyers and try to convince them to utilize them as their agent.
Side note: Recently I’ve seen a drop in buyer contacts from Zillow. I think this has to do with more buyers understanding how the process works with Zillow selling leads to buyer agents and using their agent to setup showings but still using Zillow to browse homes for sale.
So what can you do to help encourage buyers to contact you directly instead of these real estate agents?
Unfortunately Zillow won’t allow you to add your contact information where these agents profiles are located.
This is because technically, you are listed with me as your listing agent, even though you are still selling FSBO.
Also, we can’t edit your homes description in the MLS listing that gets syndicated out to Zillow because it violates the terms of service for the MLS.
But there is a very good work around that you can follow in order to get your contact information prominently displayed on your listing.
You can add it to the section “What I Love About the Home”.
In order to do this, you need to follow a few steps.
Zillow Recently Changed How The Information In This Article Works!
Zillow is no longer allowing home owners to change this section of their listing. If you are a current customer that has a listing with ISoldMyHouse.com and you want your contact information added to your Zillow listing in the “What I Love About This Home” section, please send it to [email protected] and we will add it for you.
Here is an example you could follow.
“For a private showing or more information, please contact the seller directly at xxx-xxx-xxxx or [email protected]”
First you need to “Unlock the Owners Dashboard”
- Click on “Owner View”
- Click on “I’m the Owner. Show Me!”
- Click on “Edit Listing”
- Click on “Verify Ownership of This Home”
- Fill out the “Verify Ownership” form and click continue.
- Click “Correct Home Facts”
- You should now be on the “For Sale By Agent Listing” screen and should look similar to the below picture.
- Scroll down until you get to the section “Additional Information” and in the box “What I love about this home” you can enter any custom contact information you want.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and put a checkmark in the box and click “Update for sale by agent”
- Your listing should now be updated, click “View my listing” to check it out! or Share on Facebook!
- You can see your contact information in the very prominent section “What I Love About the Home”
There you go, problem solved!
Now you have your contact information very prominently displayed on your Zillow listing.
Feel free to check out some of the other options you can edit in your Zillow listing.
But it is better to keep things in sync with your MLS listing.
This will keep all your listing data consistent throughout all the online real estate portals that your listing is showing up on.
If you still have any questions or tips, drop us a comment below!
About the Author: Kris Lippi is the owner of ISoldMyHouse.com, the broker of Get LISTED Realty and an official member of the Forbes Real Estate Council. He actively writes about real estate related topics such as buying and selling homes, how-to guides for around the house and home product recommendations. He has been featured in Inman, Readers Digest, Fox News, American Express, Fit Small Business, Policy Genius, Lending Tree, GoDaddy, Manta as well as other major websites. Read more about us here.
