Zillow may have completed its acquisition of Trulia earlier this month, but that doesn’t mean the two companies will stop competing against one another in the real estate search space.
Inman News reported that Curt Beardsley, Zillow’s vice president of industry development, told a group of multiple listing service professionals that the two brands will continue to push one another to improve.
“Beating each other up, sharpening each other, for us that’s going to be there,” he told the audience at a workshop held by Clareity Consulting. “The game will happen, the game will start and we’re going to be ready to play.”
That internal competition will only extend so far, though – Beardsley said that deals the company makes for direct feeds of listing data from brokers and multiple listing services will apply across both of Zillow Group’s properties, rather than working with only Trulia or Zillow.
That’s hardly surprising, especially since Zillow will be losing listing information from ListHub in April, and Trulia is also at risk of losing that data much sooner now that ListHub is actively trying to cut it off. Losing data from ListHub means that the two sites could drop hundreds of thousands of listings at a time very close to peak home buying season.
By pooling its direct feeds, Zillow should at least be able to keep parity between the two sites that it now operates, something that will be key if the two of them are to compete effectively with one another and in the broader real estate search space.
