Online real estate giant Zillow is shutting down its Agentfolio and Buyfolio, two years after making the acquisition of the New York company. Buyfolio was a maker of online collaboration tools, making it easier for real estate agents to communicate with clients.
The service allowed home shoppers to share listings with specified collaborators — perhaps a family member, spouse or real estate agent. It then allowed those collaborators to discuss the listings, eliminating what the company called at the time of the acquisition “clunky and hard to track email threads.”
The service will be shut down March 2, 2015, and Zillow is no longer accepting new agent customers.
“While there are hundreds of agents using the product daily, our customer base is unfortunately not large enough to continue supporting our loyal users,” the company wrote in a message to clients.
Zillow said that those working on the product will be reassigned to other strategic initiatives within the company.
The closure of Agentfolio/Buyfolio comes as Zillow attempts to purchase longtime rival Trulia, which has a number of online real estate agent tools from its Market Leader business unit.
Here’s the full note that Zillow sent to customers:
It’s been close to five years since we started Buyfolio/Agentfolio and, while there are hundreds of agents using the product daily, our customer base is unfortunately not large enough to continue supporting our loyal users.
Thus, we’ve decided to phase out the Agentfolio service and transition the Agentfolio team to work on other strategic initiatives at Zillow. Until we fully discontinue the service (see our schedule below), Agentfolio will be free for those continuing to use it. However, no new agents will be able to sign up.
We are so grateful for your business with Agentfolio over the years. As the creators of this service, we’ve always loved the idea of co-shopping and collaboration and were thrilled to find so many real estate professionals who felt the same way. Without your support, we certainly wouldn’t have gotten this far.
We’ll discontinue Agentfolio in stages to ease the transition and enable you to preserve your current and previous folios. Our planned schedule is as follows:
Nov 17, 2014
From this date, a full archive file of your folios will be available in the Agent Dashboard containing customer data up to the moment of your request.
Dec 15, 2014
From this date, no new Folios can be created and the agent and brokerage landing pages will no longer function.
March 2, 2015
Agentfolio will be discontinued.
If you integrated your custom landing page (i.e. yourname.agentfolio.com) into your website or email signature, you’ll need to remove or replace that link by Dec. 15, 2014 as it will no longer function.
Again, thank you so much for your support and business through the years.
