Zillow just announced that they will allow brokers to add their listing feeds to Zillow for free.  The pitch ?  Over 4 million eyeballs per month to showoff your listings!   The free listing carrot worked for Cyberhomes and it has been working for Trulia, so would a broker that is already submitting their listings to Cyberhomes, Realtor.com, and Trulia feed their precious assets to Zillow as well ?  Well the simple answer is that brokers SHOULD because listings should be marketed everywhere, but we all know that real estate is much more complicated than that - so we'll have to watch and see.   This move corroborates the very fact that listings are imperative in attracting and retaining online real estate traffic.

New media companies like Zillow are definitely doing what it takes to infiltrate the quickly growing online real estate world, but incumbents are not letting themselves lose anymore traffic.  I don't know about you, but lately I've been noticing an advertising frenzy from real estate giant Coldwell Banker.  I see Coldwell Banker ads on evening televison shows, on sports channels and they're constantly bombarding me with ads on Yahoo mail.  Here's the latest ad on Yahoo…

What's the main message of this ad ?  I would say it's  "and your neighbors…".   So Zillow was right -  give consumers something to be curious about and they will come.  Coldwell Banker is the latest to use the Curiosity Factor as a driving force to attract more online homebuyers and sellers to their site and joins the forces of Cyberhomes, Zillow, Real Estate ABC, Reply! , HouseFront, and Property Shark to offer some variation of automated valuation services for anyone to freely use. 

 A quick snapshot of the last few months show that Coldwell Banker's latest marketing blitz may be working to drive more people to their site.

Competition is definitely heating up and consumers will undoubtedly have more options at their fingertips to better understand the market - or not.  The next question is, who will be the next incumbent tit for tat player to offer instant home valuations ?

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