Seattle-based real estate technology company Zillow is leveraging artificial intelligence to create more immersive listings designed to stand out from the pack and help a home sell faster.
The company’s new “Listing Showcase” experience comes from ShowingTime+, a brand under the Zillow Group banner, and relies heavily on photography features and interactive floor plans to bolster online home listing viewing.
Some of the highlights include:
- Immersive interactive floor plan to allows buyers to fully understand a home layout.
- Seamless toggle between photos, the interactive floor plan and a virtual tour.
- Highlighted floor plan overlay to connect the photos to their location in the home.
- Media grouped by room for easy navigation.
- Self-rotating high-res photo carousel.
To build the Showcase listings, AI is used to select so-called “hero images.” Trulia, another Zillow brand, explained what hero images are and why they matter in this previous blog post. The images in Showcase listings are based on buyer preferences, and they are connected to corresponding rooms in the interactive floor plan or room-by-room displays.
Zillow said in a Tuesday news release that the experience will improve as new functionality and AI-enabled features become available in the coming months. For example, listing agents will soon be able to select from AI-generated insights on which home facts and features matter most to home shoppers, to highlight those features in a listing.
“As soon as shoppers land on a Showcase listing, they’ll be virtually transported into the home, giving them a deep understanding of the home’s flow, architecture and design — all before visiting in person,” said Mike Lane, vice president of ShowingTime+, in a statement.
The first iteration of Listing Showcase is available in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego and Seattle. The offering will be sold by subscription and be available to a select number of listing agents in each market.
In its latest quarterly earnings report in May, Zillow beat estimates for Q1 revenue as it continues to deal with a slumping housing market. Since abandoning its big bet on iBuying, Zillow has shifted its focus to building a “housing super app” that addresses various aspect of real estate including buying, selling, and renting.
“Our goal is to increase engagement, customer transactions, and revenue per customer transaction by investing across five growth pillars: touring, financing, seller solutions, enhancing our partner network, and integrating our services,” CEO Rich Barton wrote in a shareholders letter at the time.
