To kick off Connect Now on Tuesday, Brad Inman and Trulia co-founder Pete Flint discussed the challenges and opportunities tied to the digitization of real estate.
Provided by Dow Jones
By Nicole Friedman The residential real-estate market is on its biggest tear since 2006, just before the housing bubble burst and set off a global recession. Yet in nearly every meaningful way, today s market is the inverse of the previous boom. Anthony Lamacchia, a broker and owner of a real-estate company near Boston, entered the industry in 2004. Home buyers were trading up to bigger, more expensive houses after barely a year, he said. Many buyers paid small down payments, or none at all. When housing prices stopped rising, the market collapsed. By 2009, Mr. Lamacchia was working with clients desperate to dump the homes he had just helped them buy.
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Managers are less attuned to the needs of their team at home than they would be in the office.
Zillow is ensuring employees and managers have clear expectations and support available to them.
Managers need to evolve their communication and evaluation for the new work environment.
Last year, Zillow announced that it would be moving to a hybrid work model. This means most employees can work from the office, their home, another location, or a mix.
The online real estate company is one of several employers including Spotify and Facebook that recently committed to a work-from-anywhere policy. Last month, Zillow CEO Rich Barton acknowledged the potential for a two-class system in which remote employees are considered lesser employees or have a lesser experience.
Byron Lazine and Nicole White are two agents in Connecticut who give us their thoughts on the week’s news every Friday in “The Real Word,” a weekly video column on Inman.
Last month, Zillow reported its fourth-quarter earnings in its shareholder letter, which included highlights like a revenue of $789 million and a net income of $46 million, in addition to full-year results for 2020.
But what’s worth paying attention to, as Byron pointed out, is the average monthly unique users a fourth-quarter record of 201 million. For the full year of 2020, Zillow reported another record of 9.6 billion of mobile app and website visits.