It’s a great question…
I thought I’d dive into this question a bit so I started writing a killer-post! My thought was to put together a fascinating post that described likely revenue opportunities at both Zillow and Trulia and I was even going to go so far as to estimate the value of Trulia…
However, after multiple iterations and rewrites, I’m simply not happy with where the post was going so I deleted most of the text and thought I’d let you create your own story out of my notes:
That is a great question regarding Zillow. They’ve raised $87 million to date…. but the big questions are: What is their burn rate? What are revenues? When do they expect to achieve profitability….. I’m not convinced they have a clear path to profitability with their current model…. They have around 157 employees, mostly tech / engineering oriented and what they do with that many employees has always been anybody’s guess.
I’m inclined to think an IPO is in the works and will occur sooner rather then later…. I think finding the right buyer would be a challenge right now….. and their existing investors are certainly going to be weary of raising another round, but it could happen….
Hi Dustin,
In case it helps with the math; Zillow had 5,2 million unique visitors visit the site last month.
Zillow is definitely worth $225 million. Is it worth half as much as Realtor.com? That’s comparing apples to oranges. It has 10% market share in a highly fragmented market, massive name recognition, almost all of the listings, $150 million+ in cash, and revenues of $300 million. One reason for the low market cap of MOVE is the change of control provisions in the operating agreement between NAR and MOVE: It allows NAR to get Realtor.com back from MOVE if the company is ever acquired or if there is change in the majority ownership of the company or board composition.
So there will never be any real change at MOVE…
However, speaking of burn rate, MOVE has an accumulated deficit of over $2 billion. They have burned through $2 billion to get to where they are today. Zillow seems to be a bit more efficient with capital. And smarter. On a smaller scale, people check Zillow on prospective homes like they check the weather. Zillow will ultimately figure out a way to benefit in a big way from this.
Trulia might be worth even more. However, one risk factor is this: Once a major brokerage decides to open up its listings, it’s open to everyone through Google Base. The decision for brokerages is a binary one: Is listing data proprietary or open. Once they decide on open, everyone is going to get it even though Trulia did all of the heavy-lifting on the business development front. Low-cost start-ups will be free riders on Trulia’s efforts. This is one reason that Zillow could actually win on both the listings front and with creative offerings elsewhere. On a pure-listings basis, it’s going to open.
[…] 29, 2008 by Dustin We all know that external sources of traffic are off, but what if you guys “quantified” the site so that a third party could transparently […]
Quantcast shows around 2.9 million and compete.com is at 2.2 million….
They also show that Zillow does a great job reaching an older audience!
And for sites (like WordPress.com,) , that get quantified, they give some great info around demographics, popularity, and similar sites. 😉
[…] of 4realz puts together a value breakdown between the bigger real estate sites and unfortunately comes up with little to no conclusions in […]
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