An interesting email went out today to the lenders on the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace (ZMM). The letter, shown below, makes the announcement that they will be now charging for the leads generated on the ZMM.
The new initiative will charge for “customer initiated contacts” and prices will fall into a very wide range of $0-$100.
This move goes against everything ZMM stood for or at least I thought they stood for. Just last week there was a Tweet that quoted a Zillow representative at the MBA saying, “Internet leads are dead” “Leads are so 1995″. Zillows war against traditional mortgage lead generation just took a huge step back with this new implementation of their new fee based model. They just became a whole lot more similar to the LowerMyBills and LendingTree’s of the industry then they set out to be. There are now hundreds of skeptics saying, “I told you so!”, including me. In my review over a year ago I made a quick comment: “Of course the leads will be free, but who knows for how long, though.” My thought was that the lack of price would increase the amount of fraud and spam that would occur on their network. I don’t know if a high level of fraud or spam ever occurred and I did not publicly write about the challenges they would face monetizing the network, but they did take place.
