Why You Should Be More Terrified of Zillow than Ever (and 2 ways to crush them)

I have a question for you:

Who is your #1 competitor in your marketplace?

When I ask that to a live audience, I'll hear all kinds of the typical brand answers. You'll hear the brands in their marketplace: Remax, Coldwell Banker, eXp, John L. Scott, Sotheby's, etc.

And I always tell them, you're all wrong. Your #1 competitor in your market is Zillow. Zillow is coming to eat your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And in a large degree, they already are. Now, yes, Zillow has stumbled with their flipping operation. But does that mean they're going away? No. If anything, we should be more terrified now than ever, because they're going to turn and focus their entire attention back to where they actually started out, which is selling leads to REALTORS. They are not going away.

What does this mean? When lose something to Remax or eXp, you need to ask yourself:

Did I really lose that listing to those companies? Or did somebody go on Zillow, fill out a form, and then somebody at those brands that we're talking about bought the listing lead, and then that's how the listing arrived at their doorstep? And they're paying at 35% or 40% or 50% referral fee to those companies.

That means that who won the war for Mindshare wasn't your competitor, it was Zillow. Zillow has one goal, and they're succeeding in a lot of markets. Their number one goal is for consumers to think of them when you think the words "real estate" in your mind. You don't go to your competitors' websites, you go to Zillow. That's why so many people are doing that.

So how do we win the war against this billion dollar company? I'm going to give you two ways to do it right now. And you can win every single day and eat their breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There's two things that Zillow cannot do at scale:

1. They cannot create relationships with human beings in your marketplace

2. They can't curate relationships with the community

So your job is to create relationships with people in the community, in your marketplace. How do you do it?

Number one, recognize your most powerful asset is your sphere of influence

All of us know 290 people, according to the Columbia And of that group, 11% is going to move every year. So when we put those numbers together (290 plus 11%), it says that 33 people in everybody's circle of friends and family is going to move the next 12 months. Now let's just put some numbers to this.

Let's say half of those people are not homeowners and they're not going to be homeowners. They're renters or whatever, living in mom's basement. Now we have 15. Let's assume that those 15 are already connected with another REALTOR. So that leaves us with seven or eight. Now let's throw another half of those out and just take it down to three or four. If you know 290 people, are you getting 3-4 referrals per person in your sphere of influence?

It's not about the database that we have. It's about the database of our database, sending us referrals. Every single person in our database has the power to send us 3-4 referrals.

Now, if we haven't been getting that, what's the reason, is it their fault? Or is it our fault? It's probably our fault because we're not doing a good enough job of managing our most powerful asset, which is our sphere of influence.

Then let's pivot for a second. Let's talk about your community. What are you doing to promote your community and to own a leadership status in the minds of people in your community?

Are you doing videos? Are you creating guides? Are you doing a locals, kind of a podcast or blog about the local market, about the local lifestyle that your area enjoys?

So think about those things as you're coming into the new year. What can I do to win this mindshare war?

1. Get closer to the community. Start putting out video, do a YouTube channel about your marketplace. Do a blog about your marketplace. Do neighborhood videos, do community videos, do the best of videos. Get people engaged with that.
2. Get connected with your sphere of influence because they will never replace those relationships that you have.

If you want more ideas to help you crush Zillow (and any other competitor you face), then join The Path Performance Coaching Platform.

The Path is a mentorship and coaching program for agents and brokerages, which gives you an unfair advantage in your market.

Here's a sneak peak of what you get when you join The Path:

+ 19 Weeks of Daily On-Demand Coaching so you can find more high-quality leads more often and turn them into more listings
+ Hundreds of Downloads - System, Forms, Checklists, and scripts to make your job easier
+ Live Coaching - Multiple Times a Week
+ Goal Tracking and Activity Tracking
+ New Marketing Assets Delivered Weekly

And you get two weeks to try it out for free. Visit https://www.erealestatecoach2.com/Three%20Reasons to get started.