Zillow...why is it still Active if its already sold?

Zillow is in the advertisement business.  Make no mistake.  Their income is generated from ad placement.  Ever wonder how agents get their photos on as "Premier Agents"?  They pay for it.

The cost of these online ads, like most, is priced based on activity from users.  The activity is easily tracked and typically ranks the most popular zip codes.  In Zillow's case they sell the more popular zip codes for more money.

The most frustrating and consistent conversation we have with Zillow is "Why is this house still showing Active".  Couple of reasons.  Remember, Zillow makes money from charging based on activity.  The longer you stay online searching the more they can charge.  They are in no hurry to take the house off their website.

The second reason is our Arizona MLS has a code titled UCB. When your listing gets an accepted offer, a large number of agents use Active - Under Contract Accepting Backup Offers (UCB) instead of the traditional Pending status these days. Today we have 8,048 listings in pending status and 5,177 in UCB (or CCBS) status.

Zillow does not recognize this UCB status as Pending and will show it Active even though its under contract.  

One of the other side effects of this is much higher days on market counts than we used to see. When a listing goes pending it stops accumulating days on market, but when it is in UCB status it is still on the market and continues to accumulate days on market. Today we see that pending listings have an average of 59 days on market while UCB (and CCBS) listings have an average of 80.

This increase in days on market is then reflected in the statistics for closed listings. Today we have an average of 71 cumulative days on market for listings closed in the last month. If it were back before the days of Zillow, this reading would be under 60.

This is another reason why do not recommend average days on market as an accurate way of measuring the state of the market.

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This is something we probably don't think about but should be mindful of - that when we advise the 'insurance policy' of the UCB status, we're inadvertently compromising our performance stats - both for the listing and our own.

Certainly if I feel it's in the seller's best interest to have the Under Contract Accepting Backup Offers we're going to do that. But maybe the above info should give us pause if it the deal looks solid. Judgement call.