Zillow.com Offers Featured Listings With Newspaper Ads

  • June 24, 2008
Real estate agents and home sellers buying a classified ad with their local newspaper will now be able to buy a featured for-sale or open house listing on Zillow.com at the same time.

The initiative is the latest step in a partnership formed last November between real estate site Zillow and a consortium of more than 280 newspapers nationwide, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the The Houston Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News.

The Chronicle, the Mercury News, the The Philadelphia Enquirer and the Richmond Times-Dispatch will be the first to roll out the new program in which specified listings will be highlighted as "featured" alongside free listings in Zillow search results. A couple of new papers will be added to the "featured listings" program each week thereafter.

The agreement also calls for other content-sharing arrangements such as newspapers adding Zillow features to their own sites, including the company's "Zestimates," or estimated valuations of homes nationwide.

Zillow, which had 5.2 million unique visitors in May, has raised $87 million in venture capital to date.

--Mark Walsh

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