Zillow Launches Mortgage Marketplace

Real estate website Zillow.com today announced the launch of Zillow Mortgage Marketplace, a service that provides borrowers a place in which to anonymously request custom loan quotes directly from registered lenders. The lenders can respond to as many requests from borrowers free of charge. It also includes a lender public feedback system in which borrowers can rate the lenders they contact.

Zillow Mortgage Marketplace is accessible on the Zillow.com site from the "Mortgages" tab. Users then complete a loan request form to officially begin the process. They don’t need to provide any personally identifiable information, such as Social Security number, name, address or phone number. Yet, they provide enough additional information on the request form to enable lenders to create customized quotes.

Any lenders who visit the Zillow.com site can view outstanding requests and competing quotes offered by other lenders. By only registered lenders, who have been confirmed as mortgage professionals, can participate in the quote process.

Borrowers can receive as many quotes as they would like; and a standardized quote form enables them to compare quotes and provide ratings and feedback on lenders. Lenders must disclose all fees upfront, while Zillow estimates taxes and insurance and provides an estimated monthly payment. Identities are only revealed when a borrower contacts a lender.

Considering the mortgage crisis the U.S. is currently facing, this could be a very good time or very bad time for Zillow to launch a home mortgage lending service. With both borrowers and lenders gun-shy at this point, perhaps such an offering is a good idea. Both parties can test the waters without revealing their identities and moving too far along in the process.

As long as consumers can locate the service, this should be beneficial to them. They can, without making a commitment, see what rates are available to them before they commit to purchasing a mortgage. Since more and more consumers prefer to conduct their own research (especially online) before making a purchase, this offering should be well received and capitalize on the trend of the Internet-educated consumer.

For lenders, this is a very economical way to generate leads--and strong leads, for that matter. It's unlikely consumers not serious about securing a mortgage would spend time completing a loan request form. Lenders should undoubtedly receive quality leads from this service. Yet, with the ratings and feedback processes in place, lenders must ensure they serve Zillow customers very well--or they will quickly receive a reputation for poor service they won't be able to hide.

It's important to note, however, that the service isn't completely free. Lenders have to pay a one-time registration fee of $25. Then they can create a public profile on Zillow.com that will feature their contact information.

More and more, we are able to see Zillow's business model, which is to generate high traffic with high-interest free content and then enhance that with value-add services that generate revenues. It's a model that seems to be working quite well.

Polk Drives Expansion into China

Motor vehicle information and marketing solutions provider R.L. Polk & Co. last week announced that it will soon offer newer commercial vehicle registration data for China. The data will provide geographic and vehicle configuration detail for customers interested in understanding the commercial vehicle market in China.

The data, which will be available this summer, will be offered by Beijing Polk-CATARC VIC Co. Ltd., a joint venture between Polk and the Chinese Automotive Technology and Research Centre (CATARC). Customers will now be able to receive geographic metrics on commercial vehicle registrations in China by province, city, district and postcode. Those customers, which include commercial truck and engine manufacturers, could previously only receive national level sales and production data.

Polk's China registration data includes a variety of commercial vehicles, including buses, trucks and special vehicles (ambulances, police vehicles, cranes and firefighter engines). Various vehicle specifications will also be included: from gross vehicle weight, vehicle dimensions, dimension of cargo and payload to towing weight, wheelbase, engine model, engine displacement, fuel type, number of wheels and tire type.

Databases that cover China are still very rare in the marketplace, and that really makes this offering quite intriguing and interesting. Still, that lack of such available data doesn't mean there isn't a strong interest in this information. In today's global marketplace, the demand for such data is undoubtedly increasing at a steady pace. In fact, Polk has identified China as one of the largest and fastest growing commercial vehicle markets in the world.

This new offering will effectively expand Polk's international profile and fill a need that continues to grow. "Going global" certainly isn't anything new for Polk, which while headquartered in Southfield, Mich., has offices in countries such as France, Germany and the U.K. The company will most likely explore further development of products in these regions. Perhaps this latest launch will lead to the creation of additional products geared toward the China market.

Tell Me Something I Don't Know

"Business intelligence" is a wonderful term, rife with importance, exclusivity and value. That's probably why so many data publishers have rushed to label themselves as providers of business intelligence. The term is assuredly upscale yet at the same time ambiguous, simultaneously promising everything and nothing. It's a dream term for marketers.

Yet I worry about those publishers who think "business intelligence" emanates from the marketing department rather than the editorial department. That's because the future of this business is intimately tied to delivering true business intelligence, and those who think it's a game will soon be out of the game.

Some publishers set too low a bar by believing that more information about a given company in one place constitutes business intelligence. If this is largely a collection of information available elsewhere, it's not business intelligence. It's an aggregation exercise. There's a role for aggregated content, but it simply doesn't rise to the level of business intelligence as I define it: being able to tell users something useful that they don't already know and can't easily find out from any other source.

Your reaction to my definition may be that I am setting an impossibly high bar. But for most data publishers, the jump to true business information is not a big one. It could be as simple as holding onto company press releases that disappear from the web with increasing rapidity. It could be monitoring and reporting how a company's revenues, employees, offices -- whatever -- trend over time. It could be the act of identifying a company's competitors. We know one company that plans to monitor the tenure of a company's c-suite executives to assess stability.

The web has in fact created a limitless content playground for data publishers to source, extract, mix, match, merge, infer, and impute valuable data points and insights that do in fact rise to the level of business intelligence. That's why data publishing is the most exciting corner of the information business right now. We've got the tools and the processes and the skills to create untold amount of true business intelligence extremely quickly, and often at very low cost. So let's all rise to the occasion.

BusinessWeek.com Extends Reach With LinkedIn Partnership

BusinessWeek.com this week announced that it has formed two partnerships with LinkedIn, the online professional network. BusinessWeek.com and Capital IQ, a unit of Standard & Poors, will provide company data for LinkedIn's new Company Profile feature, which launched last week. [BusinessWeek and Standard & Poors are McGraw-Hill companies].

Users who take advantage of the Company Profile feature will gain access to business overviews that contain industry statistics provided by BusinessWeek and Capital IQ in additional to information about a specific company from LinkedIn. In addition, the company profile feature also contains a link to BusinessWeek.com's Company Insight Center, where users can find additional company information free of charge.

BusinessWeek.com added the Company Insider feature, where users can view personal contacts on LinkedIn at companies that are featured in BusinessWeek.com stories. Company Insider, which launched earlier this month, is the first of several LinkedIn Intelligent Applications that will be added to the site.

In a press release announcing the partnerships, Roger Neal, BusinessWeek Digital's senior vice president and general manager, noted how the features will expand the publisher's content to BusinessWeek.com's 8 million users and LinkedIn's network of 20 million registered professionals. This is certainly a great way for BusinessWeek to expand its customer base and get its content in the hands of a group that really needs it.

LinkedIn has become such a prominent player in the business networking arena that it makes perfect sense for a prominent business content player like BusinessWeek to form a partnership. This alliance will certain open many eyes to the value of BusinessWeek content and will undoubtedly lead to an increase in traffic to the BusinessWeek.com site as well as a boost in subscriptions. It's also a smart move for LinkedIn, which certainly has a credible name in the marketplace already; but being aligned with a long-established brand like BusinessWeek definitely doesn't hurt.

With Company Insider the first of many LinkedIn applications BusinessWeek.com has planned for its site, it will be interesting to see what other features are next. They certainly have to potential to make BusinessWeek.com an even more robust source for business information.

Good Vibrations

One thing that's been curiously missing from the social networking/user-generated content frenzy of the past few years has been efforts to harness these concepts to build good company databases. It's particularly surprising given the success of professional sites such as Jigsaw and Linked-In, both of which have built remarkably robust databases of business professionals. But where's the company information?

We have seen a few attempts at letting users build out company content. Two basic models have been employed to date: a "backbone" model, where users can append comments to a fixed list of companies, and the publisher takes on the task of maintaining basic company contact details. Successful examples of this model include Yahoo Finance, Vault.com and start-up yellow pages sites such as BrownBook. The other model is "free-form" model where users decide what companies to cover and in what way, with the publisher supplying no content, and few if any restrictions. One infamous example of this was the F*ckedCompany.com site, now mercifully defunct. We're seeing more and more company profiles within Wikipedia, but they tend to get lost in this vast online encyclopedia.

Will people take the time to contribute to an open access company database? Can such a database rise above angry posts from disgruntled employees and disinformation from disingenuous competitors? Will people share valuable inside information about firms? Will individuals maintain constantly changing company information? Well, it seems we may be about to find out.

A new company, TradeVibes.com, still in beta, is aiming to become a user-generated company database. It rolls together wiki-like features with rating systems, company discussion board, job boards and more. It also offers a strong organizational taxonomy to allow discovery of companies in addition to research on known companies. It may very well be a glimpse of the future.

There's a lot of fresh thinking going on at TradeVibes, and a lot to commend its content model. If TradeVibes can get critical market traction, it could herald the next big thing in the data world: high-value, user- generated company information.

Labels: brownbook, jigsaw, Linked-In, tradevibes, vault.com, wikipedia