Zillow Pairs with Yahoo Newspaper Partners, but no Yahoo Involvement?

Real Estate “Zestimator” Zillow.com has announced partnerships with 11 newspaper publishers. The plans are preliminary, but the gist is newspaper classifieds sellers will upsell Zillow listings, and the papers and real estate site may share content in the future, according to Zillow Spokesperson Sarah Mann.

Nothing’s implemented yet, though. Now’s the time to hunker down and figure out how it will all work, she told me. The goal is to get things up and running in the first half of ’08.

Remind you of Yahoo’s expanding newspaper consortium? It should. Not only are all the new Zillow partners in the Yahoo group, Yahoo has featured Zillow’s median home prices and property value estimates in its real estate section for over a year now.

Even the Zillow press release notes, “Many of the newspaper companies in the planned Zillow agreement are part of a newspaper consortium, which formed a year ago. The consortium began with a strategic partnership with Yahoo! for online recruitment advertising.” The Yahoo partnerships deal initially involves HotJobs listings integration.

Still, Mann told me Zillow’s deals with the paper companies didn’t have anything to do with Yahoo, and were not a result of Yahoo fostering relationships between Zillow and the paper publishers. “This is a result of our direct communication with the newspapers….We’ve been talking to the newspapers since before we launched,” Mann said.

The new Zillow partners are Hearst Newspapers, Journal Register Company, Lee Enterprises, Media General, MediaNews Group, Paddock Publications, Inc., Pittsburg Tribune-Review, The E. W. Scripps Company and Times-Shamrock Communications. “More newspaper companies are expected to join the network prior to launch,” according to the release.