Zillow Group will pay $500M to acquire home touring tech company ShowingTime
“ShowingTime has a network of nearly one million agents across North America and facilitated more than 50 million showings last year. Its software is used by 370 Multiple Listing Services. The 225-person company also produces market reports.
Zillow will take advantage of ShowingTime’s technology for its Premier Agent business. The Seattle company said it plans to keep ShowingTime as an “open platform” available to anyone, much like it has with previous acquisitions including Dotloop and Bridge Interactive.”
It’s great to hear about good things happening to good people. Scott and Mike are two of my favorite people in the industry. Good on them!
This is a huge move. Zillow didn’t just buy a software application they bought an entire category. An entire operating system if you will. ShowingTime is the defacto standard in how organized real estate does showings, period.
There’s a lot to unpack here, I’m going to have to fill my “thinking glass”.
Is this really a good thing? For those of us who get ShowingTime as part of our association dues, I would hate to think that Zillow would pull those contracts. But, it would be just like Zillow to do that. No offense but I have a hard time with a company that isn’t bound by license law or a code of ethics all up in the real estate business. They clearly don’t care about Realtors. Nor do they care about making sure they are an accurate information source for consumers. All they care about is making money off the backs of Realtors, all the while claiming that consumers don’t need them. Realtors were created to protect the public – that’s our #1 objective (or it should be) – and Zillow just isn’t aligned with that goal. So not sure I’d be happy about this acquisition.
@Michele is a broker now and a member of NAR.
Congrats to Mike, Scott and Bill! The years of hard work pay off.