With over 160 million unique users per month, Zillow has become one of the most popular platforms for real estate listings in the United States. Given its high visibility among home buyers and renters alike, getting your listing published quickly on Zillow is extremely important for generating interest and securing a sale or rental. But exactly how long does that process take? In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into the key factors that determine when your newly submitted property listing goes live on Zillow.
How the Zillow Listing Process Works
Before we get into publication timelines, it’s helpful to understand exactly how submitting a listing to Zillow works. There are two main options:
Zillow Rental Manager
This is Zillow’s built-in platform for landlords and property managers to create and manage rental listings. You can submit details like property description, rent price, photos, amenities and more.
For Sale By Owner
Homeowners selling their property without an agent can submit all the details of their home listing through Zillow’s For Sale By Owner platform.
For both rental and for-sale listings, once the listing details are submitted, Zillow does some additional verification and processing before officially publishing the listing on their platform. This includes:
- Identity verification: Zillow will call the number provided to confirm the person submitting the listing is authorized to list and sell/rent the property. You need to answer some questions accurately.
- Information accuracy check: Zillow verifies things like ownership records, price estimates for the area, property details, listing status and more against public data sources.
- Manual review: In some cases listings may go through some manual review by Zillow staff as an additional accuracy/validity check.
It’s this verification and review process that adds some time between a listing being submitted and officially getting published on the site.
What Determines How Long Listing Publication Takes?
Several key factors come into play when determining the exact timeline for your listing to get through the processing phase and published on Zillow:
- Type of listing: Rental listings generally get published faster than for sale by owner listings. Rentals can publish in 24-48 hours, while FSBO listings may take up to 72 hours if all checks are smooth.
- Rental subscription status: For rental listings specifically, if you have a paid Zillow rental manager subscription, this prioritizes processing which can help reduce publishing time by 24 hours or more in some cases.
- Information accuracy and completeness: If any required information is missing or inaccurate, additional verification calls will be required, adding to the pre-publication duration.
- Identity verification process: Being available to answer Zillow’s automated verification call and providing all accurate responses helps expedite processing. Difficulties can lead to manual review.
- Current volume of listings: During especially busy summer home buying season, Zillow may receive a spikes in listing volumes across regions which can occasionally result in slightly longer processing times.
Typical Listing Publication Timelines
Taking the above factors into account, below are the typical timelines you can expect from initially submitting your listing to when it gets published on Zillow:
Rental Listings:
- 24 hours: If you have all required rental listing details submitted upfront completely and accurately, respond promptly to the verification call, and have an active paid Zillow Rental Manager subscription.
- 48 hours: For free rental manager listings with complete and accurate details.
- 72+ hours: When required listing details are incomplete or inaccurate and verification calls require multiple attempts.
For Sale By Owner Listings:
- 48 hours: Submitted all listing requirements accurately, responded promptly to verification call.
- 72+ hours: Incomplete details requiring additional verification and manual review. Can take over 1 week in some rare cases.
What to Do If Your Listing Publication is Delayed
Regardless of how diligent you are when submitting everything, there may be instances your listing takes longer than these standard timeframes to get published and go live on Zillow. Here is what you can do:
- Check your Zillow dashboard: This will show you the current status of the listing verification process. You can see exactly where things are stuck if the listing is still showing as “Processing”.
- Ensure all listing details are complete and 100% accurate: Having to call and verify info that’s missing or incorrect will add delays. Update anything required.
- Verify identity proof when asked: Being available for verification calls reduces listing approval time so answer promptly and accurately.
- Follow up with Zillow support: If issues continue past 72 hours for rentals or 1 week for FSBO listings, contact Zillow explaining your concerns for additional support.
Using a Zillow Scraper to Extract Listing Data
In some cases, you may want to extract large volumes of listing data from Zillow for analysis or lead generation purposes. Doing this manually would be extremely tedious. This is where using a Zillow scraping application can help.
Zillow scraper apps allow you to configure customized queries and automatically extract things like listing URLs, titles, prices, home details, agent information and more. The extracted data can then be structured and exported into a CSV/Excel format for easy processing and analysis.
Using scrapers helps mine relevant data 1000x faster compared to manual extraction. Just be sure the scraping is done ethically without overloading Zillow’s servers.
Tips for Fast and Smooth Listing Publication
Lastly, as the property seller or manager, below are some key tips you can follow for reducing delays and getting your listings pushed live sooner:
- Provide complete and super accurate listing details upfront when submitting so nothing is pending verification. Even minor inaccuracies lead to delays.
- Ensure you are available by phone to receive the identity verification call and answer all questions correctly.
- Build some buffer into your expectations and allow the standard 24-72 hour timeframes for stress-free processing.
- Carefully review type-specific requirements for rentals vs FSBO listings and submit docs accordingly.
In most cases if you follow all Zillow listing requirements diligently with adequate preparation, your submitted properties should get successfully published for public visibility well within the standard timeframes highlighted above. However if you do face undue delays, follow up with Zillow support right away identifying your specific issues for resolution assistance.
