Data is the new oil
Data is the new oil. It is the most valuable resource in the world.
We already talked about Zillow's business model in another blog post. In short, Zillow makes money by selling leads to real estate agents. The more leads they sell, the more money they make.
Zillow also makes money by showing you sponsored advertisements. The more you use Zillow, the more ads you see. The more ads you see, the more money Zillow makes.
Imagine if you, as a future home-buyer or real estate investor could simply export all the listings from Zillow and then contact the real estate agents directly at your own convenience.
You would not need Zillow anymore. You would not need to see their ads and you would never click on their sponsored listings.
Why Zillow does not let you export listings?
The reason outlined above tells you exactly why Zillow does not let you export listings. They want to keep you on their platform and they want to keep you using their website or application while seeing their ads.
This is not a machiavellian conspiracy. This is just good business. Zillow is a business that has shareholders and needs to make money. Unfortunately in some cases, that means the the user experience is not as good as it should be for the end user.
This negative externality is balanced however by the fact that Zillow offers a lot of data for free on millions of properties in the United States of America. If you do not wish to see any advertisement, I recommend that you install an ad blocker. I personally use uBlock Origin.
Will that ever change?
I personally think that an export function for listings would be a great addition to Zillow. I think that it would be a great way to increase the value of the platform for the end user but at the same time I can also understand that this may not be in the best interest of Zillow.
It is a tough decision. I think that Zillow should at least offer a paid export function for listings. This would allow them to make money while still offering a great user experience for the end user.
But at the end of the day, if Zillow does not want to offer an export function for listings, they are free to do so. It is their platform and they can do whatever they want with it.
How Zillow Data Exporter can help you
As you just learned it is unlikely that Zillow will ever offer an export function for listings. This is a problem for many people who want to use the data for their own purposes.
After seeing this problem, I decided to create a browser extension that allows you to export listings from Zillow. It is called Zillow Data Exporter.
The extension is free and it is available for Chrome for now but I plan to release it for Firefox and Edge in the future.
Nature hates a vacuum. If Zillow does not offer an export function for listings, someone else will. I am happy to be that someone else.
Conclusion
To conclude, we can say that Zillow is stuck between a rock and hard place. If they offer an export functionality, they may end up losing advertising revenue.
On the other hand and based on the growth of Zillow Data Exporter in the past few weeks, I think that there is a lot of demand for an export functionality for property listings.
I hope I can fulfill that need and be helpful to anyone who needs to export data from Zillow.
If you haven't already, you can download Zillow Data Exporter for Chrome for free.
If will be releasing a paid plan soon that will allow you to export more listings at once and many more features.
Stay tuned!
I hope that this blog post was helpful to you. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me on X (formerly Twitter) or on the contact form of Property Data Labs.