It is great to see you out in the market taking and responding to feedback.

Owen,

Did you seriously just ask for Lead Management? We need to talk. We can solve this issue for you and Zillow in less than a week.

Bill

Great feedback; thank you Owen.

It’s been fascinating to watch the balancing out of supply and demand in the marketplace. We were most certainly short of lenders at launch. You’re right that quote requests were steadily decreasing since then but yesterday we started to see an increase; it was 2nd biggest day (for requests) since launch.
We’re focused on two things;
a) tweaking and increasing the ways we promote the Mortgage Marketplace to borrowers on the site and,
b) adding features to the Marketplace in response to early feedback from lenders and borrowers.

And so, on to your suggestions:

1) We are working on automating quotes. Rather than limit ourselves to a single technology provider we’re building an open API that any lender or software vendor could integrate to. This is not a small project; expect us to take a few months to ship the quote API.

2) I don’t know that we need more incentive for rapid quotes; attractive loan requests are receiving multiple quotes in minutes. I do agree that receiving 100 quotes would be confusing but the transparency lenders have into competing quotes seems to be doing a job of ensuring that that doesn’t happen (even though we now have > 1200 lenders.) Thinking through your first question however we may well need a cap when quotes are optimized. What number would you choose and why?

3) There’s nothing stopping a consumer from entering their contact info in their loan requests’ comments and as trust in the marketplaces increases I’m sure you’ll see some of them do that.

4) Yes! We are receiving both useful and false-positive reports about low-ballers. It’s keeping us busy. We’re working on a quote flagging system due out soon but in the meantime, please e-mail me Owen.

5) Yep, I hear you. Please keep asking for this one. I’d also like to hear from other companies that are interested in a corporate level account for administering and reporting on their team on Zillow.

Great news about the response rate and on the lock. And great suggestions:
- automation (via an API) is coming -next- but it’s not trivial so give us a few months.
- re-pricing happens via deleting and re-quoting. This is intentional since it brings the “new” quote to the attention of the borrower. There has been a stack of requests to edit quotes so we’ll look into whether there’s a good compromise here.
- You can submit multiple quotes but they need to be distinct. You won’t be allowed to quote the same loan and rate twice per request but you can quote different loans
- assignment rules are something a lender needs to manage since accounts on Zillow are LO specific. I’ll pass this on though - we may need to eventually introduce brokerage level accounts
- great suggestion about flagging requests you’ve already quoted!

Thanks for keeping us in the loop and good luck closing the rest of your quotes!