Ah, July. You can finally bet on sunshine, the impending new school year is far enough away not to haunt you just yet and everyone you meet seems to have a smile on their face. Here at Zillow we decided to take the time to look back at some of the milestones from the first half of 2007 and boy, it has gone by fast!We’re especially interested in some of the milestones you have helped us hit, showcasing the online community that is starting to build. Here are a few of our favorites:
- January: We kicked off the year with another 2 million new Zestimates, bringing the total to more than 51 million Zestimates, with data on 70+ million homes.We also learned that if you post a home for sale on Zillow it is 200 times more likely to be viewed than a home that is not posted for sale. (Not a bad marketing tool!)
- February: We nearly doubled the number of homes with Bird’s Eye View, added page counters to the site and released our Q4 reports—quite a busy month!We also reached the 10,000 mark for the number of real estate agents registered on the site. Oh, I nearly forgot the FORTUNE cover!
- March: We took a deep breath and relaxed a bit from crazy February.We also expanded the ad Sales team by hiring industry veteran Greg Schwartz as VP of Sales.And on a smaller scale, our very own Arjun Banker got creative with his own advertising medium.
- April: Things picked up again in April as we launched what we internally dubbed “Z5”— a number of community features including user profile pages, Home Q&A, “tell us it’s for sale” and the ability for anyone to upload photos.We also launched EZ Ads, allowing any individual or small business owner to easily create and buy ads targeted to a specific ZIP code search.By the end of the month, we had reached 100,000 listings, as well as more than 50,000 Make Me Move prices.
- May: May brought forth two of our favorite stats—the one millionth registered user, and more than 20,000 community contributions each and every day! Pretty impressive stuff just a month after launching the majority of our community features. We also launched Q&A by location, released our Q1 reports, and met a number of EZ Ads milestones. Oh, and Rich sold his house.
- June: This past month has also been busy, as we readied neighborhood pages and other new stuff for a July launch.We also announced that we will be adding broker feeds in the near future, and hinted at a new mortgage feature. Plus we launched even more bird’s eye coverage to the site. To top it all off, in June we reached the 50,000 mark for the number of registered real estate agents on the site.
As you can see, we have been busy bees here at Zillow, and are pretty proud of the work that has been done thus far this year. What’s more exciting will be when we revisit this list again in December and look back upon the last 6 months of 2007… the best is yet to come!