Zillow, oh zillow… !

Posted in WordPress | Thursday, July 24th, 2008 | Trackback

So three months after I submit my feed to Zillow, plus two follow-up emails requesting a status, Zillow sends me this canned message:

Making the Listings Process Faster

Thank you for asking us to present your listings on Zillow. You are probably wondering when that will happen! We have been overwhelmed with requests, and, while we are working hard to accommodate them all, some of the data has arrived in an incorrect format.

Your listings are very important to us. In order to speed up the process, we suggest you use an integration company specializing in publishing listings to real estate sites. We have worked closely with Postlets, vFlyer, and ListHub, and they can make it easy as well as fast.

Of course, you can still submit your listings directly to us, but you will have to be patient! If you choose this route, be sure to have your webmaster submit a valid XML feed that can be maintained on a daily basis.

Wonderful! Well, I AM the webmaster, and I have an automated, zero maintenance, database driven feed… and I’m still wondering if Zillow can read and process it… and those of the many other WordPress users who are using the Great Real Estate plugin to syndicate their listings. They didn’t exactly say MY feed was in an incorrect format. Gosh darn it, Google has been reading my feed for the past 90 days and emailing me an update every day. Come on, Zillow!

So following the link to “resubmit your XML request” I dutifully filled in the form and was faced with the same message I got a month ago. “That feed URL is already being used. Please enter another one.”

If anyone at Zillow reads this, please get in touch with me. And if anyone has managed to get their feed completely set up and live on Zillow, please let me know. I’m dying to find out…

2 Comments

  1. David G from Zillow.com Says:

    Hi Roger,

    Sorry for your frustration - let’s get this resolved and your listings on Zillow!

    If you submitted the same RSS feed you submit to g-base, then Zillow would not have been able to process it. Zillow’s feed specifications are here: http://www.zillow.com/static/pdf/feeds/ZillowBrokerFeedsTechnicalSpecV1.0.5.pdf

    If that’s the issue, please let me know when you’ve submitted a compliant feed and I’ll try to have it expedited. If your original feed did conform to our spec, please let me know by and I’ll get you back in the queue.

    Just FYI - there’s a problem with your blog’s comment module (my browser is FF3.) The text for the Name and Mail field is the same color as the field background making it difficult to see what you’ve typed.

  2. Roger Theriault Says:

    Thanks David, I sent you a note.

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