Popular real estate search and valuation website Zillow today announced its acquisition of the Postlets listing syndication platform.
Postlets is a unique tool that allows users to distribute property listings and promote real estate for sale to 13 different social media and real estate websites for free, including Zillow itself, Yahoo Real Estate, Trulia, Twitter, Facebook and more.
The platform was first founded in 2005 and now has over half a million registered users, distributing up to 350,000 for-rent or for-sale property listings across the nation, said Zillow in a statement on their website that announced the deal.
At this stage, there are no plans to change the Postlets experience in any way, Zillow said.
Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow, seemed to be very excited about his company’s new acquisition. His updated blog post said that “Postlets is a brilliant tool for property managers, agents and landlords who want to promote their listings and manage their presence online for free”.
“Postlets will continue sending listings to its regular distribution partners as part of this acquisition”, Rascoff said.
No financial details of the buy-out were disclosed. However, Zillow revealed that two of Postlets employees, co-founders Raymond Chen and Asher Matsuda will join the Seattle-based Zillow on a full time basis, but remain in their San Francisco base.
The latest move by Zillow follows the September 2010 acquisition of ListHub by the Realtor.com website, a key competitor of Zillow. ListHub performs a similar service to Postlets, distributing property listings and information to Zillow, Trulia and other websites.
Zillow is awesome. When they IPO, I buy it and be riches.
Transparency is so important to the the public & it's profilers. Zillow really needs to improve, it's not a good thing when transparency is just a game.