Like the 100,000 other real estate professionals who have leveraged the Follow Up Boss (FUB) CRM since 2012, we have invested millions to build our database of nearly 15,000 contacts over the last 27 years. Zillow's recent acquisition of FUB has become a major concern for many current and former users. Agents have stored independent leads and personal data in FUB since 2011. If you use or have used FUB, that data now seems to work against you—it's no longer truly "your" data.

Would Zillow clarify the acquisition, transition, and ongoing dynamics of Follow Up Boss after the fact? No, they will not. Zillow/FUB—before and after the transition—offers agents only scripted replies and refers to their terms and privacy policy as the ultimate authority. Any challenge on legal grounds is met with shutdowns, as they cannot (or will not) answer many of the dynamics we continue to inquire about. 

There seems to be a huge disconnect all the way up the Zillow chain with regard to their advertising programs for Zillow agents and their efforts to ultimately take 40% of everyone's commission to advertise with them. Is it time to ditch Zillow agent advertising and delete your agent profile to keep FUB viable? Does anyone see what others see with this approach from a legal perspective?

FUB includes historical "Notes," company IDX traffic insights, email campaigns, personal communications, personal email account integrations, recorded phone conversations, direct marketing intel, and more—for every lead. Much of this comes through third-party integrations, with very little generated purely through the FUB CRM itself. Did we consent on others' behalf for Zillow to use all the third-party integration data from 13,000+ leads that they had no part in creating in our database? Zillow now possesses much of our independent data (data Zillow was previously oblivious to) simply because an email address in our database matches a user's email address on Zillow—what Zillow calls a "mutual lead." Great marketing term, but absolute BS and arrogance. There's nothing mutual about a lead when 95% of the data from our independently create leads, through our website, was not created by Zillow.

We received numerous written reassurances that "our" CRM data in Follow Up Boss would stay private and not be shared with Zillow agents. While this may be partially true, they now possess 20x the data they had on our very specialized market—including all third-party integrations and personal email communications that fed into Zillow's AI to enhance "mutual" leads, indirectly benefiting other agents advertising with Zillow. Today, there is diminished reason to use FUB; it's just a CRM for Zillow. Zillow will tell you that your independent leads (new leads) are not shared with Zillow agents, but at any moment, an "independent" email address of yours has a high likelihood of matching a user on Zillow at some point. Then Zillow can automatically take your data stored in FUB to compete against you with another agent advertising on Zillow who also has that lead. Zillow isn't interested in preserving great agents; it seems they were only interested in their data because they had the most of it.

The time of year and the limited window to migrate our Follow Up Boss to a different CRM leave much to the imagination for 100,000 FUB users. Notice of the updated privacy policy came in late October (we inquired), and it went into effect November 15th. Really? Do Zillow and FUB understand it would take many months/years to transition to a new CRM (at a staggering cost to boot), given the complexity for many with tied third-party services in FUB? Did Zillow clearly spell out what was actually going to happen with data before and after the FUB transition? Nope—there are many things they avoided disclosing, many they still can't answer today. As Zillow arrogantly mentioned not too long ago: "Delete Follow Up Boss if you don't like it." As of this post, we are still working on transitioning to a new CRM—a task Zillow likely knew would require massive programming to match FUB's feature set. An out-of-the-box CRM doesn't exists if you want true integration and lead insight. We have tested 9 top-tier CRMs to date, and not one has the ability to match FUB without massive custom programming; not even close. 

Maybe the holiday timing of the transition, coupled with misrepresentations and the "impossible" burden on agents, was the play for Zillow. Zillow just upped their game in every MLS on the agent's dime. Agents' independent data is now a Zillow "product" for Zillow's profit only. 100,000 agents just paid with their career investment for Zillow to compete with themselves. Full stop.

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Does Zillow's recent leverage of the Follow Up Boss (FUB) acquisition inflict stellar damage on 100,000+ real estate agents? Has big tech been thriving on "thin" class-action settlements that only incentivize highly monetized "data-grabs" through vague terms of use, privacy policy changes, and continued-use as acceptance? There is a lot more to this than people understand. A wise man told me once (Rob Hahn): "People don't appreciate this topic as much as they should." This is true. It's epic!

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