Premier Agent Innovations Reduce Chaos for Agents

Last summer I had an epiphany.

I was driving around with my real estate agent, Lisa, looking at houses on the East Coast. As her passenger, I got a front-row seat to her life.

For two days I saw her handle, with the deftness of a pilot performing double duty as an air traffic controller, the customer calls, leads, texts and emails that flooded her phone in relentless waves – all while she was showing me houses and writing offers.

I saw that and thought: it shouldn’t be this hard.

Zillow Group had to make it easier for Premier Agents to reap the rewards of our program with less chaos. We needed to offer you the tools to have a more balanced experience.

We also needed to ensure that Premier Agents had the backup power from Zillow Group to provide the predictability and on-demand service that buyers and sellers expect today.

Which is why I’m so excited by the technology updates we launched this month to the Premier Agent platform. This new system is already live in Montana, and will roll out nationwide over the coming months.

We’ve been investing and innovating over the past year to make the experience of connecting with leads better for Premier Agents, Brokers and home shoppers. Our new lead validation system will vet every lead and connect you only with buyers and sellers who are ready to talk to an agent.

But that’s not all.

Some of you have asked me if you should answer incoming calls at 3 a.m. or during a parent-teacher conference.

That question made me pause to absorb the consequences of our fast-changing, on-demand economy. The mobile phone has truly become the remote control of our lives. We click once and within minutes, everything from food to cars to flat screen TVs appear.

We insist on smooth online experiences or we move on. This will hit the real estate industry full-force, and it presents a unique challenge. Buyers and sellers want agents to be as reliable and available as Amazon. Yet they also expect you to be as devoted to them as their best friend.

To solve that problem, we rebuilt our Premier Agent system to reply to buyer and seller inquiries within seconds by text, email and phone, allowing buyers to immediately schedule a time to connect with Premier Agents. We intend for every buyer and seller to speak to a Premier Agent or Broker through a live phone call introduction and transfer.

With us doing the heavy lifting to qualify leads, you get to invest in building those personal connections that make all the difference.

And if you miss a call from us while we’re attempting to connect you with a validated lead, don’t worry. You won’t lose your place in the queue. We will call you with the next home shopper we validate in proportion to your advertising share of voice.

We’ve heard you loud and clear: you want qualified leads and you want to connect with them when you are available. Not while you're at a school play, coaching a soccer game or celebrating an anniversary.

Consumer expectations may have changed, but that doesn’t mean that you, alone, have to shoulder the burden of keeping up with these ever-shifting demands. It just means Zillow Group had to create the right technology so you can delight your clients, have time to enjoy your life – and actually sleep when it’s 3 a.m.