Zillow is acquiring ShowingTime, a Chicago tech company that pioneered online scheduling for the residential real estate industry, for half a billion dollars.
Zillow said Wednesday that it is buying Chicago's ShowingTime for $500 million. Founded in 1999, ShowingTime has developed an online scheduling platform for home showings, helping agents coordinate schedules and seamlessly book a confirmed home showing online.
ShowingTime said it has a network of nearly one million agents across North America, and last year it facilitated more than 50 million home showings.
Zillow said ShowingTime will continue to operate as a standalone platform and that it will continue to invest in the Chicago tech company. The technology will help boost the Zillow Offers product, which buys and sells homes in dozens of markets across the country.
For Zillow, ShowingTime is its second largest acquisition ever, according to GeekWire, behind only its $2.5 billion acquisition of Trulia in 2015.
"We have been impressed with ShowingTime's ability to simplify a cumbersome but critical part of the home shopping experience by integrating with MLSs, agents and brokers, and giving buyers' agents an easier way to schedule showings with listing agents," Errol Samuelson, chief industry development officer at Zillow, said in a statement.
ShowingTime is led by CEO Scott Woodard, who started the company in 1999. Woodard, who's also a founding board member of the Information Technology Association of Illinois, sold his previous business ZyLAB to Battelle.
