Zillow lays off 25 percent of staff

Zillow, the online resource to find out how much your home is worth, announced that it has laid off 25 percent of its workforce to prepare for what it expects will be an extremely severe economic environment.

"This week we are reducing our workforce by 25 percent, Rich Barton, Zillow's CEO said in a blog post. "This was an incredibly painful decision for me and the leadership team, but, in the end, we concluded that we had no choice but to securely batten down the hatches as we sail into a major economic storm.

"The unprecedented economic events that are playing out on a global stage began in our own industry and have made a prolonged recession likely, in our judgment," he added.

Barton went on to explain that despite having a sizable cash reserve, the company is still not profitable and the best move for Zillow at this juncture was to reduce employee expenses to "emerge from the other side of the recession in a very strong position, even if the recession lasts many years."

Barton was quick to point that his decision to cut staff was not the result of lackluster performance. According to the CEO, Zillow recorded 5.4 million unique visitors last month, which represented a 42 percent increase over the same period last year. And although that should improve its financial condition, Zillow is still losing money each month, which made these layoffs necessary.

Zillow is just the latest of many technology companies to announce layoffs over the past week.

[ca5ter]

Zillow's technology is flawed. It removes the human factor from the house search process and focuses on "comparable" houses that have sold in the past. The one thing everyone knows about real estate is, location, location, location. No fact based system can provide this detail, especially, Zillow's limited pool of data. Until they improve their results, the site will loose traction and visitors.

[Luigi Semenzato]

It's sad to see a tool as useful as Zillow having a hard time finding a profitable business model. Certainly Zillow's pricing model will never be able to take into account a number of factors, but it does a great job at presenting relevant statistical and factual information which is in the public domain but would be highly impractical to obtain by individual buyers and sellers. Zillow is one step in the right direction for reducing the huge overhead of real estate agencies. Although I am a capitalist at heart, I almost think that the government should buy Zillow and make it available to the people if there is no other way of paying for it.

[doconn7]

Zillow hurts the public by posting false values on line as fact. Market value is what a buyer is willing to pay and what a seller is willing to sell for.

[tsawickyj]

Zillow is helping to kill the housing market. I hope they go under. period.