How We All Kept Moving

In a year of unimaginable upheaval, real estate agents and brokers helped rewrite the book on real estate.

It’s easy to forget how different things were just 12 months ago, when the coronavirus upended the norms around how people buy and sell houses. Remember packed open houses? In-person signings? Driving around with clients to tour houses?

While those things are still happening on a smaller scale, the speed and degree to which agents pivoted to technology to help clients keep moving forward is a testament to the incredible resilience and determination that contributed to a banner year for real estate.

Together, we kept things in motion, recognizing that the ways in which people moved had to change because their fundamental need to do so had not.

As we mark the one-year anniversary of a period like no other, it’s worth remembering some of the ways that we worked together to do what might have seemed impossible when the year started.

Video chat tours

It’s pretty remarkable how quickly we all adapted. To ensure everyone had a touring option that worked for them, we reworked our button options for buyers, allowing them to request a video tour to keep their journey moving. You answered the call, using remote technology for real-time walk throughs so your clients could experience homes, linger on details and ask questions as if they were standing alongside you. 

You deepened that virtual experience by embracing Zillow’s 3D Home® tour feature, tripling the number of 3D Home tours published on for-sale listings from 2019 to 2020. In addition to helping to make the process of home touring safer during a pandemic, you used the tool as a cost-effective way to highlight and share listings as the market heated back up.

Interactive floor plans

Your embrace of 3D tours spurred us to make virtual touring into an even richer experience for buyers with the introduction of Zillow 3D Home interactive floor plans. Rolled out in 35 markets on Feb. 17, the technology takes the photos you capture on our free Zillow 3D Home app and applies our computer vision and machine learning models to create both a 3D tour and an interactive floor plan. The new tool, which will expand to other markets throughout the year, adds predicted room dimensions and square footage to the floor plan, helping you give your clients get a better feel for the home by marrying features in the photos to the spot on the floor plan where they would be.

Safety protocols

The early days of the pandemic were nothing but uncertain. Scientists had not yet identified the primary transmission route as airborne, so much attention was given to sanitizing surfaces, reducing hand-to-face contact and wearing gloves. As the science evolved, so did the protocols you practiced for mask-wearing and social distancing. 

We further contributed to the conversation around safety by enlisting former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Regina M. Benjamin to advise us on safety protocols.

Working virtually

As you moved from the office to home-based work, we moved with you, creating Home Base, a central hub for the tools you needed to succeed: a revamped Conversion Playbook, a new tours toolkit, the latest tips for working virtually and more. 

Buyer activity insights 

You used push notifications from the Zillow Premier Agent app to deepen your understanding of active clients with whom you have a My Agent relationship. These notifications allowed you to better prepare for their questions and identify opportunities to connect when they resumed searching after an inactive period, repeatedly viewed the same property or expanded their search to a new market or ZIP code.

A new customer resource center 

The early days of the pandemic produced an onslaught of customer questions around how to move safely, how to protect their finances and whether it was a good time to buy and/or sell. We created the customer resource center to provide objective information to empower customers to make informed decisions about their next move. That they were able to do so is a credit to your dedication, and we’re proud to have played a part.