In an interview with Brad Inman, Andy Florance, CEO of CoStar said Zillow was “hijacking” listings and also compared them to the Mafia. His analogy was as follows:
“An agent puts up a yard sign, and then another company pulls up, spray paints over the sign, and puts a new agent’s name on the sign. Florance said no one would tolerate such behavior in the real world.”
Here’s what I’m picturing from Andy’s description.
In a recent post about the divorce of Homesnap and BPP Homesnap’s co-founder Steve Barnes stated…
“Homes.com and Homesnap.com will also offer paid preferred placement for listings in search results.”
Would this be tolerated in the “real world”?
Co-star already does listing “hijack-hijinx” on their BizBuySell platform for business opportunities brokers. They make it nearly-impossible for potential clients to contact the broker directly. All contact info runs through their servers including any phone calls; they are routed through a BizBuySell unique phone number that than routes to the broker. So client doesn’t have brokers direct number. I suspect they are planning on reselling the leads to highest bidders later.