Yahoo Completes Real Estate Outsourcing to Zillow

Yahoo and Zillow have completed their announced deal for the latter to power all listings on Yahoo Real Estate. While the plan was revealed six months ago, it took the two companies this long to implement it. At this point, all for-sale listings on Yahoo come from Zillow. The company will handle the local real-estate advertising for Yahoo as well.

"One phone call can now connect industry professionals to the biggest real estate network on the web," Spencer Rascoff, Zillow CEO, said. 

"The launch of this partnership will simplify advertising decisions and bring Zillow listings to millions of additional users every month," he added. 

Zillow boasts that it has over four million for-sale listings on any given time, all of which will show up on Yahoo Real Estate besides on its own site. It will also be the exclusive provider of such listings for Yahoo.

Yahoo Real Estate is billed as the second biggest such website in the US, after Realtor.com. Now, along with Zillow which occupied the third position, it becomes the biggest player. Zillow already provided Yahoo Real Estate with part of the listings as well as home valuations.

"This partnership brings together the scale of Yahoo!'s audience with the depth of Zillow's real estate listings," Greg Hintz, head of Yahoo! Listings, said.

"No other real estate websites are better suited to bring such a vast offering to agents, brokers and advertisers," he added.

Yahoo has been outsourcing plenty of its non-crucial businesses. The strategy for the past two years has been to focus on core strengths and get rid of everything else.

Underperforming sites were shut down, some properties were sold and Yahoo outsourced as many services as possible. From job listings to its search engine, plenty of Yahoo websites are powered by third-party technology and data.