in this video we will show you how to contact a listing agent directly on zillow.com now you've
probably stumbled upon this video because you've recently figured out that there's something fishy
going on with zillow and the fact that it's quite frankly very hard to contact the listing agent
if you use the contact agent button on a typical listing on zillow the person who actually responds
is not the listing agent so in this video again we will show you how to figure out who the listing
agent is for a property you see on zillow and furthermore how to actually contact the listing
agent now the first thing we'll direct your attention to is in the search results which are on
the right hand side below each listing it actually says the name of the listing agent brokerage
so for any avoidance of doubt the first thing you can do is basically write down the name of this
brokerage and uh if and when you use zillow to contact somebody regarding this listing
if the person who responds is not a member of that brokerage then you know for sure
that zillow has connected you with some other agent who is not the listing agent
so let's go ahead and click on this listing the first thing to mention as i'm sure you're already
aware is that using the contact agent button will not connect you directly with the listing agent
if you use the contact agent button you will be connected with a buyer's agent who is
participating in the zillow premier agent program now the zillow premiere agent program instantly
connects agents with buyers and basically allows these buyer's agents to market their services to
prospective home purchasers this is a major source of revenue generation for zillow zillow is
a publicly traded company which has a market cap as of today of over 12 billion dollars so there's
certainly not a charity and what we're showing you today is essentially the very heart and soul
of zillow and how it actually makes money it makes money by selling ads selling of ads on a practical
level means that this contact box is for sale some agent is paying to be on the receiving end of this
contact agent box and zillow makes tremendous amount of money from the premier agent program
we've pulled up here zillow's annual report and we've taken a look into the
income statement where it breaks down the revenue by source and as we can see here the premier agent
subcomponent or segment of imt which is one of their divisions in 2020 generated 1 million 46 954
which is in thousands translation zillow generated 1.046 billion dollars from essentially
disintermediating listing agents and prospective buyers by way of the premier agent program
so now we've established quite clearly why this confusion is happening and therefore we can
move on to the next part of this process which is how to actually contact the listing agent
so we've established that this box does not work it will not contact the listing agent
now let's try the take a tour button now i guess this seems somewhat promising it is taking us to
a next steps a call to action so to speak so maybe this is going to contact the listing agent wrong
it will not and in fact in this case they're much more transparent than in that other button where
they didn't tell us that the person they're going to connect us with is a buyer's agent here it very
clearly says they will connect you with a buyer's agent who is obviously not the listing agent
so we're over two so let's scroll down further on the listing and see if we can find any other clues
listing agents are generally prohibited from putting their contact information in the
description i wonder why so we're not going to be able to actually figure out the contact details
through this part of the listing so if we scroll down further we're actually going to make a bit
of progress here now we see the following listed by john salt keller williams eagle realty so this
area is the primary way of figuring out who the actual listing agent is for a property on zillow
what do you do here well at this point you actually need to literally google this person
until you find a way to contact them be it their phone number email or if there's a contact box
on this person's website so let's figure out how to contact the listing agent who in this case
is john salt at keller williams eagle realty we've copied the information we'll open a new tab
and we'll go ahead and paste that into the browser or the search bar
and we have a couple results here we have on the right a google my business
posting here we can see the phone number so you can try contacting them using that phone number
there is also a result here you can try the first one and uh this it does not appear to
be his actual official website but it's uh going to provide some links so here we have
john's salt website let's click that and let's see what happens it doesn't
appear to be a very quick website so maybe we can try this one instead
this one let's take a look accept cookies don't see contact information yet
still don't see contact information so this looks like it's the home page of this brokerage's local
site so we haven't found john's information let's go back to the first link which appears to be
quite unreliable but in any case still don't really see his contact information so let's go
back to google scroll back here we go this looks like the direct result from his company's website
doesn't appear to be working it's a bit slow here we go and finally we found the email of
the listing agent so my goodness that was a real pain quite an expedition and quite frankly it's
ridiculous that there's no way for us to directly contact the listing agent but we're not sure of
that yet because we haven't gone down to the full bottom of the listing page here on zillow
so let's keep trying to see if there's any other way to contact the listing agent in one click
so the next thing to look at is source this will always tell you where the listing is coming from
in this case it's coming from the miami association of realtors and there's almost always
an mls number now one way to potentially contact the listing agent is to search for this mls number
on google many of these realtor groups also have a direct consumer facing website which
has contact listing agent box available for you to use so in other words you could
literally google this mls number if you see any website result from miami association of realtors
it might be a website that you can use to find the listing contact the listing agent directly
if we scroll down a little bit further we see another box which is inviting us to take a tour
this is not the listing agent because we see here that it clearly says buyer's agent so at least in
this case solo has been very transparent if we use this box expect to be contacted by a buyer's agent
so if we scroll down further we see that there's a contact agent box but again much
as was the case with the contact agent button zillow does not specify who we're contacting
it doesn't say listing agent nor does it say buyer's agent as a result we are really not
sure what's going on here but from testing we can tell you that as of today this box will not
connect you with the listing agent instead it will connect you with a zillow premier agent
so let's go all the way to the bottom and what we're seeing here is that there's really no other
call to action there's no other option to contact the listing agent so in conclusion on zillow
on pretty much every listing on their platform any listing by a traditional agent on zillow there is
literally no way as of today for a consumer to directly contact the listing agent in one click
any any sort of call to action box prompt on a listing on zillow will route that person to a
zillow premier agent somebody who has paid money to advertise on zoa so we hope you found this
video helpful if you have any questions please leave us a note in the comments below the video
i'm nick at house it and if you are looking to buy sell or rent here in new york city long island
hudson valley or south florida we'd be happy to help and save you quite a bit of money check
out our website hauseit.com and give us a shout via team@hauseit.com or call us at (888) 494-8258
we'll also put our contact details in the description below
thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next video