Zillow serves the full lifecycle of owning and living in a home: buying, selling, renting, financing, remodeling and more. It starts with Zillow’s living database of more than 110 million U.S. homes — including homes for sale, homes for rent and homes not currently on the market, as well as Zestimate home values, Rent Zestimates and other home-related information. — Zillow Website
Since 2006 Zillow has been “ dedicated to empowering consumers with data, inspiration, and knowledge around the place they call home and connecting them with the best local professionals who can help.” (Zillow Website) From Zillow’s about page, it’s hard to gauge their target age range for their platform. Zillow has two potential users: those who have a house they want to rent or sell and those who are looking for housing. For the past few months, I have been using Zillow to look for housing post-grad and I’ve noticed there are some things that are not working out for me.
Saved Homes Feature
Zillow gives you an option to add a ‘shopping partner’. Your shopping partner can instantly share saved homes with you. This option is great considering I will have 2 other roommates. Sharing what we’ve all saved through Zillow’s platform would eliminate the google sheets we are currently using to add the houses we like. When I went to add both of my future roommates, I was only able to add one person.
When I saw that I wasn’t able to add two shopping partners I quickly thought that maybe Zillow was intended for a different audience; maybe they are thinking about couples who are buying are buying a home together. They are not thinking about three new grads renting a home together because they can’t afford to live alone. I’m probably looking into this too much but this feature got me thinking about the potential of Zillow surrounding features for people searching with a group.
In order to communicate my findings with my other roommates, I update our shared google sheets which they may or may not see instantly because they are not alerted when I add a new listing. Since I am just posting links and some details, it’s hard to talk about the listings in our group chat. What would be great is if, within the shopping partner feature, there could be a feature where we can directly communicate with our shopping partners about the listings we saved.
This whole process doesn’t seem natural. It’s rather tedious and makes looking for housing with a group more complicated than it needs to be.
Contacting Listing Manager
For each listing on the site, you are able to directly contact the listing manager. The contact button opens up a form which includes your question, phone number, and email. On this form, I noticed that you cannot edit the email field. What if I wanted to add my roommates’ email so they are also aware of what I am asking the listing manager. On Zillow’s website, there is no way to track what messages I send until I get a follow-up email from the manager to my personal email. I think another great feature would be to allow you to directly message the manager from the Zillow website. This feature would eliminate the repetition when it comes to reaching out.
COVID-19 updates
Because of COVID-19, many listing managers are not offering in-person tours. Instead, there are some managers offering video tours. Because of our current situation, it is important for Zillow to continue to improve upon the communication and collaboration aspect of the platform.
