Inside the room: How one agent team’s feedback is shaping Zillow’s tools

Chase Whitney has been Rollerblading through Orange County, California, neighborhoods since he was a kid, passing out his mom’s real estate flyers for ice cream money. He never planned to be an agent. He was going to be a rock drummer.

Then one day in the early 2010s, he came home and told his mom, Sheri Whitney, he’d “misread” his college registration — but not to worry, because he was getting his real estate license instead. He showed his mom his YouTube channel with 7 million hits on his drum videos, along with a head full of ideas about what modern real estate marketing could look like.

That was roughly 15 years ago. Today, The Whitney Team/FirstTeam® Real Estate is an 11-person operation built on the belief that the agents who win are the ones who stay ahead. “We want to do things that are going to get more interest early on,” Sheri said, “and not just sit back and wait for things to happen.”

It’s the same philosophy that landed Chase, Sheri and their most tenured agent, Kim Bogan, in a room on the 36th floor of Zillow’s Seattle office this spring, where they were speaking on a panel to 300 Zillow product, engineering and design employees at the company’s annual team retreat.

The invitation

Zillow builds tools used by millions of agents every day. For real estate professionals, that suite of products spans both sides of the deal, giving agents the flexibility to work the way they want, with tools designed to meet them where they are.

Follow Up Boss is the CRM of choice for more than 80% of the highest-volume real estate teams in the country. ShowingTime enables tours on 90% of all homes for sale in the country — 40 million tours were booked through the platform last year. And dotloop facilitates closings for nearly half of all transactions nationwide. Agents can choose from these products at any point in the transaction, from the first signal that a consumer is shopping to the final closing document.

But the people writing the code and designing these features don’t always get to sit across from the agents using these products day-to-day. This panel was designed to change that by holding an unfiltered conversation between Zillow’s builders and the agents who know exactly where the tools help and where they could work harder.

The Whitney Team uses Zillow Pro^SM, Zillow Showcase^SM, Zillow Preview^SM and Follow Up Boss, and Zillow wanted to hear directly from agents like themselves about what’s working and what’s not. 

The ask was simple: Walk us through what a day in the life of an agent actually looks like. Not the highlight reel. The real one.

So they did. Kim was writing offers from the airport and the hotel lobby — one was for a buyer client who Kim had shown a property the day before leaving Orange County. On the listing side, Chase’s week had involved coordinating contractors for a seller renovation, and making a daily trip to check on a vacant listing — watering plants, checking the pool — for an out-of-area seller who’d left him with the keys. “That’s the non-sexy stuff,” he said, “but someone has to do it.”

The room where the panel took place, which had started with a few people in the back on laptops half-listening , got progressively quieter. Questions ran long enough that the moderator had to cut them off. At lunch afterward, the table kept getting fuller. After the event, the moderator sent Chase the “aha moments” recap. The Whitney Team’s session accounted for two of the four top takeaways from the entire retreat.

“People were blown away by what we think to be just kind of ... the normal, run-of-the-mill stuff we do,” Chase said.

Agents at the center of the product

Zillow didn’t invite The Whitney Team to give a testimonial. It invited them to be honest, and that kind of direct agent input is increasingly central to how Zillow thinks about building its products.

The agents who use Zillow’s tools every day experience things that don’t always surface in a product meeting: the workflow that adds an extra step, the feature that works differently in practice than in theory, the place where two tools almost, but don’t quite, talk to each other. Getting that feedback directly — from agents who are inside the platform on live listings, in real markets, with real sellers — is what makes it actionable.

For Chase, being part of that conversation through both the retreat and as a member of Zillow’s Agent Advisory Board, which he joined in March, has given him a front-row seat to how seriously that input is taken. “Once we see the feedback turn into something,” he said, “it’ll be very exciting.” 

Zillow Preview in practice

The timing of the trip turned out to be perfect.

The week before the Zillow retreat, Chase had launched a Zillow Preview listing for the first time. Two doors down on the same street was another listed property with the same floor plan, same price point, similar finish level — essentially a controlled comparison.

After three days on Preview, Chase’s own informal comparison of the two listings found that his Zillow Preview listing had generated 3.2 times more views per day, 5.5 times more saves per day, and had already accumulated 67% of the comparable home’s total 15-day view count — in three days. It outright beat the other listing in raw saves for that period.

“You can’t have a better example than that,” Chase said, “because it’s the same floor plan in the same neighborhood.”

Chase now uses Preview for every listing. For him, the trade-off calculus is simple:  “There’s no negative to it,” he said.

A different perspective

Being inside Zillow’s world has given Chase a perspective of the company, which he’s started sharing with colleagues back home.

“It does give me a different perspective being inside the room now,” he said. “Getting to hear directly from the people that are building the products — what I’m seeing and hearing firsthand is much more along the lines of a positive.”

Kim left Seattle with the same feeling. “I thought it was fascinating that they were so fascinated with us,” she said. “They took our opinions, they came up afterwards and asked questions — it seemed they were very open to it. I thought it was awesome that they invited us to take part.”

The experience also reinforced something The Whitney Team already believes about how its agents approach their business: Preparation and proactivity are what set great agents apart. “Wherever we go, we’re prepped with unique insights and approaches,” Chase said. “Whether it’s marketing, listing or buyer strategies, how to write an offer, we’ve built very robust, and sometimes unique, approaches to things.”

Still passing out flyers

Sheri still sends handwritten personal cards. Chase automates everything he possibly can. They had been through eight CRMs in seven years before landing on Follow Up Boss. Sheri described herself as the reluctant adapter. She said Chase “comes back from these seminars and wants to change up everything.” Then, without missing a beat: “He’s just so good and does such a great job. Very proud.”

That tension between what’s worked for 30 years and what’s going to work for the next 30 is exactly what Zillow was trying to understand when it put three agents on a stage in front of its entire product organization.

The Whitney Team didn’t come to Seattle to be polished. They came to be useful. And for a room full of people who build tools for agents they rarely get to meet, that turned out to be the most memorable session of the retreat.