Nextdoor vs Redfin!

Nextdoor, the social media app where neighbors can get together to throw block parties and find babysitters on a Friday night, is butting into Redfin and Zillow’s territory!

What is Nextdoor?

Nextdoor has been primarily used by local members in a community to get to know each other. In this day and age, people rarely meet their neighbors, and are oblivious to what’s happening in their communities. Nextdoor helps local residents find services like gardeners, babysitters, and dog walkers.

They have a really cool recruiting model where they will send postcards to all of your neighbors on your behalf to get them to join the app! The people who are receiving the postcards are much more likely to join the app if they know that it’s coming from someone in the neighborhood. It’s a hyper-local social media site where members use their real names and addresses.

Moving into Unfamiliar Territory

In the past few years, Nextdoor has been bombarded with requests and queries from their users related to home values, home repairs, and sales. According to the Business Journal article, Nextdoor began investing in real estate listings two years ago. Now, the real estate section is Nextdoor’s second largest revenue stream behind ads.

It plans on releasing features that will provide users with their home’s estimated value, expected profits from selling, and direct connections with real estate agents. It’s basically providing all of Zillow’s services.

Nextdoor users are a closer bunch, and the company wants to provide a better platform for home owners and real estate agents to form relationships.

On Zillow, a premier agent can pay around $2,500 a month to be displayed on all listings in a particular zipcode, even if the agent has nothing to do with the listing.

Nextdoor allows agents to pay under $1,000 a month to be listed as a local agent in two targeted zip codes. Agents say it feels a lot closer to sending postcards directly to homeowners.

Doing business this way is like going back to the old way of door knocking and getting to know your neighbors. One local agent said, “It’s an online way to have my community aware of me and my business”.

What’s Next for Nextdoor?

In the future, Nextdoor plans to roll out services to help members find local contractors and lenders, as well as creating more ways for agents to showcase services and find leads.

Their biggest challenge is that this market is saturated. There’s already Yelp, Thumbtack, Angie’s List, Zillow, Redfin, etc…

Nextdoor also lacks the reputation that these other behemoths already have for their services. For example, if I want to check out a home and it’s estimated value, I’ll go to Redfin first. I don’t think of using Nextdoor to check my home values, much like how I don’t thing of Yelp to buy groceries.

Nextdoor will keep doing what it already knows. It’s established itself as a predominant way of being as connected to your community as possible. When Nextdoor users raise their hands and ask for help, they’ll invest in ways to give their customers what they want.

Time to download Nextdoor again!

Here’s the link to the original article on the Business Journal: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/06/25/nextdoor-zillow-redfin-residential-real-estate.html