Real estate listings site Zillow reported its first earnings as a public company today, after debuting on the NASDAQ in mid-July. Zillow revealed record revenues of $15.8 million in the second quarter, up 116% year-over-year. Net Income for the quarter came in at $1.6 million, compared to a net loss of $2 million in the same period a year ago and a net loss of $0.8 in the first quarter of 2011. This quarter marked the company’s first quarter of GAAP profitability

Zillow saw record Marketplace Revenues of $9.7 million, up 269% year-over-year. Premier Agent subscribers, which contribute to Marketplace revenues, totaled 13,385 at June 30, 2011, up 180% from 4,777 at the end of the second quarter of 2010. Display revenues increased 30% to $6.1 million from $4.7 million in the second quarter of 2010.

The company’s Average monthly unique users grew 93% to a record 20.8 million in the second quarter of 2011 compared to 10.8 million average monthly unique users for the same period in 2010. And July 2011 marked another record traffic month with 23.2 million unique users to Zillow’s websites and mobile applications, a 98% increase from July 2010.

Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff said of the company’s first earnings as a public company: “The second quarter was outstanding for Zillow with record revenues, traffic and mobile usage. It marks our first profitable quarter on a GAAP net income basis and our fourth consecutive profitable quarter on an Adjusted EBITDA basis..We’re extremely pleased with our progress and rapid growth, yet we believe we’ve only scratched the surface of our opportunity.”

Profitability for the company is a big deal considering that while revenues were growing for Zillow, the company had been taking a loss each quarter for the past three years.

Zillow, which initially filed its S-1 in April, currently lists over 100 million U.S. homes, including homes for sale, homes for rent and homes not currently on the market. Zillow launched a mortgage marketplace in 2008, and subsequently expanded into rentals and mobile. According to Experian Hitwise, Zillow.com is the third most visited Real Estate site in the U.S and received 5.36% of Real Estate visits in March 2011, which is a 53% increase compared to March 2010.

It’s time for TechCrunched, where we take some of the most popular stories running on TechCrunch and put them together for you in a quick video package. This week was a big one for Apple, with stellar earnings and new products. Google+ took the iTunes App sStore by storm. And Zillow had a big IPO. If something grabs your attention, make sure to click on the links below to get more information.

Also, we’ve created a TechCrunched podcast so you can download episodes and subscribe on iTunes.

The Key Subtle Notes From Apple’s Earnings Call 

Apple’s Tim Cook: The iPad Is Cannibalizing Some Mac Sales, But There Are “A Lot More Windows PCs To Cannibalize Than Macs”

The MacBook Is Dead. Long Live The (New) MacBook Air.

With OS X Lion, Apple Touches Upon The Next Decade Of The OS

Google+ iPhone App Pushes Out Speedy Update To Keeps Users From Spinning In Circles 

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Call For The Reinvention Of The Toilet, Offers $42 Million In Potty Grants

AmEx Links Up Facebook With Coupon-less Deals, And Lets Merchants Go Social

Zillow Soars 200 Percent In First Trade With Over $1 Billion Valuation

Yahoo’s Q2: Revenue Down 5 Percent To $1.08B; Net Income Up 11 Percent

IBM Posts Q2 Revenue Of $26.7B With Net Income Up 8 Percent To $3.7B, Ups Outlook

eBay Beats The Street; Revenue Up 25 Percent To $2.8B; PayPal Posts First $1B Quarter

Microsoft Hits $17.37B In Revenue In Q4, $69.94B For The Year

Shares of real estate listings site Zillow began trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol ‘Z’ today, opening at $60 per share. This gives the company a whopping $1.6 billion valuation. Zillow priced its IPO at $20 per share yesterday, after upping the pricing of its IPO to $16 to $18 per share, from the initial range of $12 to $14 per share. While the stock price soared to $60 per share in first trade but has dropped to $43 per share. Zillow raised $69 million in the offering.

According to Experian Hitwise, Zillow.com is the third most visited Real Estate site in the U.S and received 5.36% of Real Estate visits in March 2011, which is a 53% increase compared to March 2010. While Zillow is growing traffic, the company has been taking a loss in terms of net income for the past three years. But the company is cash-flow positive.

For the years ended December 31, 2008, 2009 and 2010, the company generated revenues of $10.6 million, $17.5 million and $30.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of 49%, 65% and 74%, respectively. And during the three months ended March 31, 2011, Zillow generated revenue of $11.3 million, as compared to $5.3 million in the three months ended March 31, 2010, an increase of 111%.

The company lost $12.8 million in 2009, and lost roughly half of that ($6.7 million) in 2010. The company, which launched to the public in 2006, also revealed that as of December 31, 2010, it has an accumulated deficit of $78.7 million. In the three months ended March 31, Zillow lost $826,000.

Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff told us in an interview this morning that the new funds will be used for headcount growth, especially for developers and salespeople. He says that mobile usage has helped grow the company’s revenue and when it comes to prduct development priorities, mobile development is at the top of the list.

In terms of the timing of the public offering, Rascoff explained that the company was ready from business standpoint, but also believes the public offering helps company grow further. “Becoming a public company puts us on a whole new stage,” he says, “It’s like being drafted into the major leagues.”

Underwriters for the include Citi, Allen & Company, Pacific Crest Securities, ThinkEquity LLC, and First Washington Corporation.

Zillow currently lists over 100 million U.S. homes, including homes for sale, homes for rent and homes not currently on the market. Zillow launched a mortgage marketplace in 2008, and subsequently expanded into rentals and mobile, which has been a huge growth area for the company.

LinkedIn also saw a significant pop from pricing ($43 per share) to $83 in the first trade. The company’s stock continued to rise in the first day of trading but subsequently fell over the next month. But LinkedIn’s stock has rebounded, opening today at $101 per share.

Zillow’s pop is surprising considering the company has not made a profit yet. And a 200 percent increase in share value for the real estate listings company (which initially had a $500 million valuation) should only add fuel to the claims we are in a tech bubble.

Real estate listings site Zillow has just priced its IPO at $20 per share, giving the company a $539 million valuation. Last week, the company upped the pricing of its IPO to $16 to $18 per share, from the initial range of $12 to $14 per share. Zillow, which will begin trading under the symbol “Z” on the NASDAQ tomorrow morning, will raise as much as $79.6 million in the offering.

The number of changes in Zillow’s pricing (and the steady increase in share value pre-IPO) is similar to LinkedIn and Pandora’s pricing increases. These companies saw fluctuations in the share value post-IPO (though both companies have rebounded in July). Other tech companies like HomeAway, Fusion-IO and Yandex didn’t post a number of changed in pre-IPO pricing and have seen steady share values.

Zillow, which initially filed its S-1 in April, currently lists over 100 million U.S. homes, including homes for sale, homes for rent and homes not currently on the market. Zillow launched a mortgage marketplace in 2008, and subsequently expanded into rentals and mobile.

According to Experian Hitwise, Zillow.com is the third most visited Real Estate site in the U.S and received 5.36% of Real Estate visits in March 2011, which is a 53% increase compared to March 2010. While Zillow is growing traffic, the company yet to make a profit, and has been taking a loss for the past three years. This could be a factor in how the market reacts to Zillow tomorrow morning.

Underwriters for the include Citi, Allen & Company, Pacific Crest Securities, ThinkEquity LLC, and First Washington Corporation.

Zillow, which will begin trading under the symbol “Z” on the NASDAQ, aims to raise as much as $71.6 million in the IPO.

Zillow, which initially filed its S-1 in April, currently lists over 100 million U.S. homes, including homes for sale, homes for rent and homes not currently on the market. Zillow launched a mortgage marketplace in 2008, and subsequently expanded into rentals and mobile.

The number of changes in Zillow’s pricing is similar to LinkedIn and Pandora’s pre-IPO pricing increases. And clearly both of those companies saw strong fluctuations in the share value post-IPO (though both companies have rebounded in July). Some tech companies like HomeAway, Fusion-IO and Yandex have seen steady share values.

According to Experian Hitwise, Zillow.com is the third most visited Real Estate site in the U.S and received 5.36% of Real Estate visits in March 2011, which is a 53% increase compared to March 2010. Clearly, Zillow has impressive traffic and is growing revenue but has yet to make a profit, and has been taking a loss for the past three years. These could be factors in how the market reacts to Zillow next week.

Zillow, which initially filed its S-1 in April, currently lists over 100 million U.S. homes, including homes for sale, homes for rent and homes not currently on the market. Zillow launched a mortgage marketplace in 2008, and subsequently expanded into rentals and mobile.

The company’s traffic to its web and mobile sites is up 100 percent year-over-year and in May 2011, Zillow was used on a mobile device more than 8.8 million times, with more than 1.7 million homes viewed on mobile devices each day.

For the years ended December 31, 2008, 2009 and 2010, the company generated revenues of $10.6 million, $17.5 million and $30.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of 49%, 65% and 74%, respectively. And during the three months ended March 31, 2011, Zillow generated revenue of $11.3 million, as compared to $5.3 million in the three months ended March 31, 2010, an increase of 111%. Unfortunately, in terms of income, Zillow has been taking a loss for the past three years.

The company lost $12.8 million in 2009, and lost roughly half of that ($6.7 million) in 2010. The company, which launched to the public in 2006, also revealed that as of December 31, 2010, it has an accumulated deficit of $78.7 million. In the three months ended March 31, Zillow lost $826,000.

According to Experian Hitwise, Zillow.com is the third most visited Real Estate site in the U.S and received 5.36% of Real Estate visits in March 2011, which is a 53% increase compared to March 2010.

It should be interesting to see how Zillow will perform on the public markets. Some tech companies like HomeAway, Fusion-IO and Yandex have seen steady share values, whereas Pandora and LinkedIn saw huge fluctuations in share price. And the fact that Zillow hasn’t made a profit yet could influence this.

LINKEDIN (NYSE:LNKD)

Professional social network LinkedIn probably had the biggest IPO in terms of hype this year because it was one of the first big social media companies to go public. After pricing its IPO at $45 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, LinkedIn began trading at $83.00 per share on May 19, giving the company a $7.8 billion market cap. In the first day of trading, shares popped up to as high as $122.70, soaring past a $10 billion valuation.

But these high stock prices didn’t sustain and LinkedIn’s value per share dropped significantly over the next month, dropping as low as $63.71 per share. However, the company’s stock rebounded last week, with shares rising as high as $95.50 on Friday, eventually closing at $94.54. That’s a 110 percent increase from its initial pricing.

PANDORA (NYSE:P)

Similar to LinkedIn, music streaming service Pandora also drew considerable attention to its IPO, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the desirable, single character symbol ‘P.’ The company priced its IPO at $16 per share (valuing the company at $2.6 billion), but opened at $20 per share on June 15 (up 25 percent), valuing the company at $3.2 billion.

In the two weeks following the IPO, Pandora’s stock took a bit of a dive, reaching as low as $12.16 per share. But like LinkedIn, Pandora’s shares saw an uptick over the past week, closing at $20.04 on Friday, which is up 25 percent from the company’s initial pricing in June.

YANDEX (NASDAQ:YNDX)

Russian search engine Yandex, which began trading on the NASDAQ on May 24, priced its IPO at $25 per share, but opened at $35, giving Yandex a market cap of roughly $11.2 billion. That’s a bigger market cap than both LinkedIn and Pandora.

Yandex has experienced highs and lows in the past month with the value of its stock, but the fluctuations have not been nearly as extreme as some of its contemporaries in the tech IPO market. Yandex’s stock dipped to a low of $29.73 in mid-June but rebounded quickly and closed on Friday at $35.69, which is a 40 percent increase from its initial pricing.

FUSION-IO (NYSE:FIO)

Fusion-io, the developer of flash- memory technology for companies, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on June 9. The company priced its IPO at $19 per share, valuing Fusion-io at $1.5 billion, but opened at $25 per share, giving the company a nearly $2 billion market cap.

Fusion-io’s stock has performed fairly well over the past month, reaching a high of $36.32 last week. The company’s shares closed at $31.19 on Friday, up 64 percent from its initial pricing.

HOMEAWAY (NASDAQ:AWAY)

Vacation home rental service HomeAway debuted its IPO last week, pricing at $27 per share. HomeAway, which listed on the NASDAQ, saw its shares pop over 30 percent in initial trading last Wednesday, giving the rental service as valuation of $3 billion.

HomeAway’s shares have maintained its value, relatively speaking, in its first week of trading, reaching a low of $34.92 and a high of $42.30. On Friday, HomeAway’s shares closed at $38.42, a 42 percent increase from the stock’s pricing.

RENREN (NYSE:RENN)

Chinese social network Renren actually went public before LinkedIn, pricing its IPO in early May at $14 per share, with a total offering size of $743.4 million. The company was pitching itself as a “Facebook” like site for the Chinese market, which resulted in an increase in the share price range from the initial $9-$11 to $12-$14. That increase resulted in a boost in the deal size to $743.4 million from the original price of $584 million.

RenRen opened at $18 per share, but the stock has since plummeted to as low as $6.23 per share. On Friday, RenRen closed at $9.25 per share, which is a 34 percent drop in value from the initial pricing.

BANKRATE (NYSE:RATE)

Bankrate provides free rate information to consumers on more than 300 financial products, including mortgages, credit cards, new and used automobile loans, and more. The company priced its IPO at $15 per share, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. The company’s shares, which began trading in mid-June, have remained fairly steady at this price, reaching a high of $17.89. Bankrate closed at $17.13 per share on Friday, up 13 percent.

Who’s Next Up To IPO

Zillow: Real estate listings giant Zillow filed its S-1 in April, so we could be seeing the company hit the public markets in the next two months. Zillow wants to raise $51.75 million in the offering, and while revenue has grown for the company year over year, Zillow has taked a loss for the past three years. Zillow will trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol “Z.”

Kayak: Travel search engine Kayak filed its S-1 last November, aiming to raise $50 million. No word on when the search engine is planning to IPO, but Kayak did reveal revenue growth in the past year, however net income is down. The company will trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol “KYAK.”

Groupon: Daily deals giant Groupon just filed its S-1 in June, aiming to raise $750 million in the public offering. Though the company has an impressive revenue run rate of $2.6 billion for 2011, but has drawn criticism for a lack of profits and the fact that the founders have taken a significant amount of money off the table. The company is looking at an IPO in the Fall.

Zynga: Zynga just filed for its $1 billion IPO this past Friday, revealing impressive financials. Revenues grew 392 percent in 2010, up from $121.5 million in 2009. In the first quarter of 2011 alone, the company’s revenues reached $235 million (or a $940 million revenue run-rate), which is up 134 percent from the first quarter of 2010. Both Zynga and Groupon may be rushing to IPO ahead of Facebook, which is expected to file in the coming year.

Not Yet Filed, But Champing At The Bit:

Facebook: We know an IPO is in the works for Facebook, it’s just a matter of when. The company has been meeting with bankers to discuss IPO size and time frame for an offering. And the company just added Netflix founder and CEO (and an IPO veteran) Reed Hastings to its board. It’s been thought that the social network will go public by April 2012, but it could happen before this date.

Glam Media: We’ve heard Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is planning to file for an IPO as early as this Fall. The company has hit $100 million in annual revenue, reaches 90 million people a month in the U.S., and is in the process of hiring bankers to lead its offering.

Yelp: Online reviews and daily deals giant Yelp has its sights set on an IPO, but the timeline is unclear. Yelp is now at 50 million unique visitors per month, mostly in the U.S., and has raised $56 million in funding.

Disclosure: My husband is an employee of Groupon.

That club was once reserved for the big blue-chip industrial companies: Chrysler (C), Ford (F), Sears (S), U.S. Steel (X), and Woolworth (Z). Of that list, only Ford and U.S. Steel remain. Chrysler was acquired by Daimler and lost the C to Citibank. Sears lost the S to Sprint Nextel. Woolworth went out of business.

Of course, there are already several tech companies in the single letter club. Agilent Technologies (A), NetSuite (N), Sprint Nextel (S), and AT&T (T). But none are pure consumer-based Internet companies.

Zillow, the real-estate website, applied for the NASDAQ ticker symbol Z in a filing last month. But, it hasn’t started trading yet. Pandora has beaten them in the race.

In the past, the NYSE has said it was holding M for Microsoft (MSFT) and I for Intel (INTC). M is Macy’s but I is open. There are no signs Microsoft or Intel are planning a change.

There was also talk at one time that Yahoo (YHOO) might take the Y spot, which is now at Alleghany. Go figure. Perhaps because it ends in Y.

What about possible stock symbols for Facebook, Twitter, or Groupon. F is already Ford, T is AT&T, and G is Genpact. In Groupon’s filing, they wrote they expect to apply for the symbol GRPN. Symbols don’t usually change unless there is an acquisition, or the company goes bust, so those companies would need to pick something else.

At one time, stock symbols were printed on the ticker tape and handwritten on transaction slips. So, shorter was faster. Today stock symbols have less importance, but the single letter companies can still say they are part of a very exclusive club.

My grandfather used to try to fool people with a joke saying of the thousands and thousands of companies traded on the stock market, how many have a single letter as a ticker symbol? He always enjoyed when someone not thinking clearly might say 50 or 100. He would proudly tell them there can only be 26. With Pandora getting added tomorrow, there will only be 20.

Zillow, which saw 19 million visitors in March, is now listing 100 million U.S. homes, including homes for sale, homes for rent and homes not currently on the market. For the years ended December 31, 2008, 2009 and 2010, the company generated revenues of $10.6 million, $17.5 million and $30.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of 49%, 65% and 74%, respectively. Unfortunately, in terms of income, Zillow has been taking a loss for the past three years, according to the filing.

Zillow, which launched a mortgage marketplace in 2008, expanded into rentals and mobile. The company’s traffic to its web and mobile sites is up 90 percent year-over-year and in March 2011, Zillow was used on a mobile device more than 8 million times, with more than 1.4 million homes viewed on mobile devices each day.

In terms of financial specifics, Zillow appears to be losing less money each year. The company lost $12.8 million in 2009, and lost roughly half of that ($6.7 million) in 2010. The company, which launched to the public in 2006, also revealed that as of December 31, 2010, it has an accumulated deficit of $78.7 million. Zillow forecasts that its revenue growth rate will decline in the future as a result of the “maturation” of its business.

Costs are also expected to rise for the company has it invests more money into product development; sales and marketing; technology infrastructure; strategic partnerships (Zillow powers Yahoo real estate listings) and acquisitions (Zillow just bought Postlets), and the general administration, including legal and accounting expenses related to being a public company.

From the filing, “If we fail to continue to grow our revenue and overall business and to manage our expenses, we may continue to incur significant losses in the future and not be able to achieve or maintain profitability.”

Marketplace revenues grew from $3.9 million in 2009 to $13.2 million (increase of 238 percent), and represented 43% of total revenues in 2010 compared to 22% of total revenues in 2009. Zillow says the increase in marketplace revenues was primarily due to the growth in the number of subscribers in its Premier Agent program from 2,764 as of December 31, 2009 to 8,102 as of December 31, 2010, which is an increase of 193%. Marketplace revenues also increased as Zillow began to charge mortgage lenders for participation in the mortgage Marketplace in January 2010.

Thanks to more traffic, display revenues increased from $13.6 million in 2009 to $17.2 million in 2010 and represented 57% of total revenues in 2010 compared to 78% of total revenues in 2009.

According to Experian Hitwise, Zillow.com isthe #3 most visited Real Estate site in the U.S and received 5.36% of Real Estate visits in March 2011, which is a 53% increase compared to March 2010.

Zollow’s IPO follows a number of technology companies that have filed S-1 filing to go public, including Pandora, LinkedIn, Boingo Wireless, and HomeAway.

Founded in 2005, Postlets allows individual real estate agents, property managers and landlords to create listings and send them to 13 real estate and social media websites. The free platform itself makes syndication of listings easy. It allows you to create a listing and then automatically distribute the posting across the Web. Postlets also allows agents to create a personalized, customized landing page to showcase all postings in are centralized.

Postlets currently has more than 500,000 registered users have used the platform to create and distribute 350,000 for-sale and for-rent listings in the U.S. As part of the acquisition, Postlets co-founders Asher Matsuda and Raymond Chen have joined Zillow as full-time employees. Postlets will continue to send listings to its current distribution partners.

Zillow, which launched a mortgage marketplace in 2008, has expanded into rentals and mobile. The addition of listings management and syndication is added to the mix with the purchase of Postlets. Zillow is also looking at an IPO in the next year.

The real estate bust is still dragging down the economy, but some startups are making the best of a bad situation. Real estate search engine Trulia, is still growing by zeroing in on subscription services for real estate agents. CEO Peter Flint tells me the company edged into profitability two months ago—six years after the company was founded. He won’t give specific numbers, but says that revenues are doubling from a year ago and almost half comes from real estate agents who pay for Trulia Local Ads and the premium Trulia Pro service to help market their listings.

Traffic to the site is up more than 50 percent from last year, up to 9 million unique visitors a month, according to Flint. ComScore estimates a smaller number—6 million U.S. visitors in September—but even stronger growth of 155 percent (Zillow grew even faster at a 200 percent annual clip to 7.6 million uniques, so it’s not just Trulia that is doing well here). Trulia’s growth comes from expanding its listings to rentals earlier this year, and in general trying to help people make smarter real estate decisions with all sorts of tools and data.

Demand for Trulia’s private shares on SecondMarket are among the fastest-growing. Flint plans to expand further in 2011 with new products aimed at the real estate market. He still has some catching up to do, however. Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate, and Realtor.com are all still larger sites.

Rascoff joined Zillow in 2005 as one of the original executive team members and has been serving as chief operating officer since October 2008. As COO, Rascoff has been responsible for the majority of Zillow’s day-to-day operations for the past two years, overseeing marketing, finance, partner relations, legal and human resources as well as the execution of the company’s recent partnership with Yahoo to power for-sale listings for the company. Prior to his role as COO, Rascoff was chief financial officer and vice president of marketing.

Prior to Zillow, Rascoff was the vice president of lodging at Expedia, which he joined after IAC’s $675 million acquisition of discount travel site Hotwire.com in 2003. Rascoff co-founded Hotwire in 1999.

After becoming profitable the company is ready, says Barton, for a new CEO. And Barton, who will continue to work at and advise the company, says that Rascoff’s experience and skill set will help the company move forward.

Zillow, which launched a mortgage marketplace in 2008, recently added rentals to its business, opening up the site to a new market in the wake of the burst of the real estate bubble. Profitable and growing in traffic, Zillow saw 12.5 million unique visitors in August, up 41 percent from last year. Plus, Zillow has seen over 2 million downloads of its mobile apps. The company is also hoping to IPO in 2011 and according to reports, is currently courting Wall Street investors.

Rascoff confirms that Zillow would like to go public, and cites profitability as one of the steps on the path to an IPO. But for now, Rascoff says he wants to help create a “long-term” company, focusing on growing the site’s reach and audience. He highlights that Zillow is also looking to grow its mortgage marketplace. Currently, Zillow is getting 313,000 loan requests per month and is hoping to increase this number in the future.

Zillow’s will integrate its 4 million for-sale listings on Yahoo’s real estate site, where users will still be able to search for home listings by the same parameters as on Zillow’s site, such as by geography, price and other criteria. For-sale listings placed on Zillow will automatically appear on Yahoo Real Estate.

But the partnership is more than just an outsourcing of listings. Zillow and Yahoo Real Estate will be coordinating sales efforts for the advertising network, so that advertisers who buy Showcase Ads or Featured Listings on either site will automatically have those placed on both Yahoo Real Estate and Zillow. Zillow’s Premier Agent program will be extended to Yahoo Real Estate, and current Zillow advertisers will be offered the first chance to purchase Premier Agent placement on Yahoo.

This deal feels like deja vu of two months ago, when Yahoo announced that it was outsourcing personals to Match.com. Yahoo also outsources job listings to Monster, after it sold HotJobs to the job listing service for $225 million.

Similar to the situation with Match.com a few months ago, Yahoo and Zillow have a history of working together. In 2006, Yahoo Real Estate integrated Zillow’s home valuation technology into its user experience.

But it seems that yahoo isn’t completely handing over the keys to its real estate search to ZIllow. Zillow, which launched as a mortgage marketplace in 2008, also powers rentals, which Yahoo doesn’t appear to be aggregating. For now, at least.

Still, it’s a good deal for Zillow, a startup that survived the real estate market implosion, and seems to be back on its feet. The site has seen record traffic over the past six months and has seen 1.75 million downloads of its mobile apps. In my opinion, it’s only a matter of time until Yahoo just outsources all real estate listings, including rentals, to Zillow.

Zillow’s Android app has similar functionality to the iPhone app. The Android app uses GPS technology to find and follow users on an aerial map, and displays values, homes for sale, homes for rent, listings and recently-sold data on the homes around their local area. Users can also search for homes, even if they’re not nearby, utilizing the Android’s voice search capabilities. You speak the address, neighborhood, zip code or city into the phone and the app will instantly take the user to the location on the map.

And the app leverages Google Street View by displaying curbside images of homes and streets. Each listing features the same details as the listing on the web, with multiple photos, home details, and contact information on homes for sale or for rent. Users can also filter their home searches by sale price, rental price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms and listing type (for sale, for rent, and recently sold).

Zillow, which launched as a mortgage marketplace in 2008, recently added rentals to its business, opening up the site to a new market in the wake of the burst of the real estate bubble. Zillow is also hoping to IPO in 2011 and according to reports, is currently courting Wall Street investors.

Zillow, a popular real-estate listings site, recently tweaked the pricing model in its marketplace for mortgages, angering many of the lenders who pay Zillow for customer leads. A few weeks ago, the site announced that it will be introducing a new pricing model for these leads to lenders.

Zillow’s mortgage marketplace, which launched in 2008, lets borrowers submit loan requests for mortgages and then review quotes provided by lenders. Basically, lenders will be able to submit any number of loan quotes for free, but will be required to pay Zillow a “market-priced fee” when any borrowers contact them regarding their quotes. When a contact is made, the lender will be charged a market-priced fee.

Zillow insists that “the market” will determine the price for each contact and it will not be setting the price itself, but rather it seems to be based on how much each lender is willing to pay for a lead. The company did warn lenders that Zillow contacts are more valuable than Google clicks for mortgage keywords, which typically range from $7-$25. Each Zillow lead is can be anywhere from $1 to $100, with lenders able to set a maximum price to pay per contact. Lenders will also be required to pre-fund their Zillow accounts with a minimum of $250 so Zillow can automatically deduct the price of the lead from the lender’s account.

On the site’s forums, it’s apparent that lenders are not happy with the new system. First, lenders are angered because they are now not allowed to list contact phone numbers or link to any of their contact systems, because Zillow needs a way to monitor whether the lender does in fact get a lead. Zillow will post a 1-800 phone number for each lender, which is actually forwarded to the lender’s actual phone number. Zillow records any calls made from a borrower to a lender to make sure leads are accurate (which works in the lender’s favor but is a little sketchy, as some lenders point out). The first phase of the new system rolled out a few days ago and already lenders are complaining of disconnected calls.

And of course lenders are frustrated by the fact that Zillow is even implementing a fee in the first place, when the site has long been known as a free and open marketplace for both lenders and buyers. Apparently realtors on the site, who often get leads from advice forums, aren’t being charged for their customer contacts (yet).

The change in policy is interesting considering the fact that a few months ago, Zillow’s CEO and co-founder Richard Barton told CNET that Zillow is growing, despite the credit crunch and implosion of the real-estate industry, because the site “doesn’t try to over-monetize.” But in its message to lenders, Zillow said the free marketplace that was launched in April 2008 was an “experiment” to determine if the site could connect borrowers with lenders. The project worked and Zillow is currently seeing borrowers filing an average of 50,000 loan requests per month, with thousands of lenders helping to fund and close these loans.

Nothing stays free forever.

The economy is in the hole, and real estate is in an even deeper hole. What better time to invest in a real estate search engine? Shasta Ventures just led an $8 million series B financing in Roost, a real-estate search engine that is grabbing data from MLS listings (actually from something called the IDX, or Internet Data Exchange, which is a close proxy to MLS listings).

As a result, Roost claims to have more comprehensive and accurate listings in the cities it covers than competing real-estate search engines such as Trulia and Zillow. Roost offers 3.1 million listings in about 30 major metro areas.

Yet Roost’s traffic barely registers. It is much smaller than Trulia, Zillow, or Redfin (which I’ve charted as a comparison below because Redfin also is not yet nationwide). Roost was late to market, so it is a bit surprising that it was able to raise a second round in this environment. Direct access to the MLS listings is an advantage, but is it enough to get Roost over the hump?

Roost raised 5.5 million last January from General Catalyst Partners, the Cross Country Group and Geolo Capital. They all participated in the current round as well. Roost also just added foreclosure listings from First American CoreLogic, a pretty common feature on real-estate sites.

But they don’t hate it so much that they won’t compete.

MRIS is launching a beta version of a service called HomesDatabase that shows MLS listings. For now only homes covered in their region are shown, but they hope to partner with the other MLS systems to create a complete database covering the U.S.

They say they’ll compete with better and more up to date information. They can ensure this by simply restricting the data they release to third parties. Since they’re a geographic monopoly, that’s trivial.

MRIS CEO David Charron says “if you listen to the consumer, everybody wins.” But one thing they’ve left off the site are for-sale-by-owner listings, which cannot be mixed with MLS listings. Until that rule is abandoned, brokers and agents still have a ridiculous advantage over people who sell their homes directly.

Richard’s blog post:

This week we are reducing our workforce by 25%. This was an incredibly painful decision for me and the leadership team, but, in the end, we concluded that we had no choice but to securely batten down the hatches as we sail into a major economic storm.

The unprecedented economic events that are playing out on a global stage began in our own industry and have made a prolonged recession likely, in our judgment. We are a young company that is not yet making a profit. Despite having sizeable cash reserves, we deemed the responsible course was to meaningfully reduce expenses, so that Zillow emerges from the other side of the recession in a very strong position, even if the recession lasts many years.

Saying goodbye to dedicated colleagues, who we have worked with side by side, is miserable. This is a group of incredibly smart and talented people who helped build and support a product they can be proud of. I want to thank these folks for their service and contributions and offer my apology for the having to make this decision. I wish the circumstances would allow us to continue having them contribute to Zillow’s success.

One of the reasons this is so difficult is simply because the business continues grow. In the midst of the madness that surrounds us, we counted 5.4 million unique visitors to Zillow.com in September, which was a 42% increase in traffic over this time last year. Fear, value-shopping, and curiosity are driving people in record volumes to our site. The fact that we have never spent any money on advertising gives me tremendous confidence in our consumer-centric product vision and in the long-term leverage in our business model (free, open access funded by targeted, relevant advertising). While our revenues do not yet cover our expenses, those revenues have been growing at a rapid pace and we will continue to have open positions in areas that are directly tied to revenue, such as advertising salespeople.

So, this is a jolting and sad week for us here at Zillow – both for departing employees and those of us who will be adapting to a smaller organization. However, given the potential for an extended recession, we firmly believe that we are doing what is painful but necessary to ensure a bright long-term future for a company that, in a very short period of time, has become an important resource and a household name for all those interested in homes.

But just how comprehensive are these sites, and how accurate are their listings? Trulia offers 3.5 million listings nationwide, and Zillow has 3.1 million. But people look for houses in local markets, not nationwide. What matters is comprehensiveness withing local market

A few hours after I put up that post, I heard from Roost, a competitor to both Trulia and Zillow (with only 1.4 million listings in the markets it covers) that differentiates itself by getting its data directly from the same Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) that real estate brokers use. They just happened to have study in their back pocket (which they commissioned and paid for) that compares the “accuracy” of search results in three cities (Dallas, Miami, and San Diego) across different real-estate search services (Roost, Zillow, Trulia, Yahoo, and Google). The study, which was done by real-estate industry consultants the WAV Group, defines accuracy as the percentage of listing results that match listings the MLS for that city.

The results are in the chart above and, not surprisingly, Roost comes out looking great. For each city, it returns between 95 and 99 percent of the listings in the MLS. Trulia’s accuracy in the study ranges between a pitiful 9 percent for San Diego to 61 percent for Miami. (Zillow generally does worse across the board, with its accuracy ranging between 12 percent and 36 percent across the three cities).

Trulia disputes these results. Heather Fernandez, vice president of marketing, says:

The data looks very questionable, and not in line with our internal coverage data. Our data shows that we have roughly 70% coverage in most major metros.

And indeed, if you do a search for homes for sale in San Diego on Trulia, you get 4,395 results, compared to 6,036 on Roost. That’s 73 percent. (Zillow claims 7,661 listings in the San Diego city limits). Even if half of them are stale listings or not accurate in some other way, it’s hard to get to the 9 percent that the Roost-financed study claims. That’s because for some reason, the WAV study only compared homes in each city with exactly 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, within a $50,000 price range.

That methodology seems random and flawed to me. Would Trulia’s accuracy be greater if the study had looked at homes in San Diego that cost $400,000 to $450,000 instead of $300,000 to $350,000? Comprehensiveness would have been a virtue in the study’s methodology as well as in what it was trying to measure.

Still 70 percent accuracy is not that great, and it doesn’t seem like Zillow is any better. If the MLS in any given city is the benchmark, both have a lot of work to do. And Trulia, for one, is striking deals with different MLSs to incorporate their data. But it only has 14 so far, out of about 900 nationwide. MLS-based sites like Roost and Redfin may have more listings in the markets they serve, but they don’t serve every market yet. For instance, in San Diego, Redfin tracks 6,300 homes for sale, better even than Roost. Yet neither has any listings in New York, and Redfin only has 473,000 listings total.

Yet Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman also balked at my earlier suggestion that either Trulia or Zillow are even close to comprehensive within any given market. In an e-mail to me, he said:

What got me was that almost any real estate site has more homes for sale than Trulia or Zillow.

Frenandez doesn’t think that having the most listings matters. She responds:

Listings are commoditized –there are dozens of sites that offer basic listing information in every city across the country. It’s not a competitive advantage for an Internet company.

What is more important, she says, is the filtering the site allows home buyers to do to help them make an informed decision. I’d say it’s both. Those filtering tools (heat maps, sales comps, local school info) are also becoming commodities. You want to cast your net as wide as possible before you filter down so you don’t miss out on that one house that fits all of your criteria.

Zillow, the site where you can find pricing estimates and other info about houses around the United States, aims to disrupt the online lending market with the launch of its Mortgage Marketplace.

The marketplace is a free service that hooks lenders up with borrowers. It works very much as Zicasso does for travelers (see our review of that service here). Borrowers submit just the essentials – what type of loan they need, where they’re located, their estimated property value, their credit history, etc – without divulging any of their contact info. Then certified lenders make offers that can be compared side-by-side. It’s up to the borrower to reach out and contact those lenders, not the other way around as it is with services like Lending Tree.

Zillow cites a Harris Interactive study showing that it’s more important for borrowers to keep their contact info private than to find the best rates. Apparently lenders are a bit too eager to sell you on a deal after they know how to find you. So the main advantage of this marketplace lies in protecting borrowers’ identities and tipping the balance of power into their favor.

There are other advantages to the system as well. Borrowers can rate lenders and leave comments about them so that others can make better decisions. The extra transparency also lets lenders know what types of offers they are competing with, which could lead to more competitive deals. That’s okay with lenders, though, since they’re gaining access to a larger market for which to make their offers.

According to the company, Zillow attracts about 5M unique visitors monthly, 1/5 of which are looking for a loan and 2/3 of which are looking to buy or sell a home. We’ve also been told that 1 in 3 professional lenders visit Zillow every month. This traffic is therefore a natural fit for a service like this, which shouldn’t have a problem gaining traction.

Some other fun facts about Zillow: of the 90m homes in the US, 80M are listed in Zillow and 70M have estimated prices (“zestimates”). A full 45% of the 90M total homes have been looked up on the site; in San Francisco that percentage is around 90%.