Zillow TV Show to Debut in 2024 After Instagram Success

HGTV and Zillow have announced the launch of a real estate television show inspired by a Zillow-themed Instagram account.

Zillow Gone Wild is an Instagram account dedicated to showcasing the most unexpected, exciting and eccentric listings on Zillow's platform. The account was launched in 2020 and has amassed 1.8M followers since.

And now the U.S. cable TV channel HGTV is harnessing the Instagram account's popularity to create a television show featuring eight 30-minute episodes and a 1hr season finale. Each episode will highlight three properties and introduce viewers to buyers, sellers, home-selling tips and property histories.

The channel had approximately 900,000 viewers in the week commencing 4 September 2023, according to U.S. television database USTVDB.com.

Zillow for its part is happy for the free publicity it seems. “We are huge HGTV fans and are excited for this show,” A Zillow spokesperson told Inman. “We can share more details in the coming months.”

Zillow's TV experiment is an interesting marketing strategy—and clearly thinking outside the box is the name of the game right now; rival CoStar has spent north of $3M on its unorthodox "fantasy-football" auction competition that entered its second year last week.

Let's see which one builds more brand recognition...