Zillow today launched the latest version of its Rentals mobile app for Android. The app includes a number of new features, such as integrated 3D maps from Google, but it also marks the company’s first foray into offering foreign language support.

The Zillow Rentals app now features Spanish-language support in an effort to “better serve the rapidly growing Spanish-speaking community in the United States.” This, Zillow claims, makes it the “ first major online real estate company to optimize its app for the Spanish-speaking community.”

It’s still pretty unusual for app developers to launch a Spanish-language version of their apps for the large Hispanic and Latino population in the U.S. As Zillow notes, however, this segment in the U.S. is growing at four times the pace of the national population and is adopting smartphones significantly faster than other segments.

It’s not clear if Zillow will also bring Spanish-language support to its other apps for purchasing real estate or to its iPhone apps. A Zillow spokesperson told us that its Android app had reached a level of maturity that justified its focus to add Spanish.

This new version also introduces support for Google’s 3D maps and filters for laundry and parking, but otherwise, the app mostly remains unchanged compared to the previous version.

Zillow says about 7 million users visit the site’s properties to look for rentals. Zillow recently expanded its set of tools for rental professionals and acquired the rental and real estate search site HotPads for $16 million. Its database currently features about 600,000 rental listings, which are also syndicated to other platforms, including Yahoo Homes and HGTV’s FrontDoor.

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Real estate site Zillow came in ahead of analyst estimates in its just-released fourth quarter earnings report, with $34.3 million in revenue and net income of $0.5 million.

The revenue number is a record for the company, and it’s also up 73 percent year-over-year. Of the total, $26.8 million came from the marketplace and $7.5 million came from display advertising.

Zillow also reported earnings per share of 2 cents. Analysts had predicted revenue of $31.47 million and earnings of 0 cents per share. This continues Zillow’s pattern of coming in a bit ahead of analyst estimates.

The numbers involved here aren’t exactly overwhelming, so the growth in the company’s mobile traffic may be more interesting than the earnings win. In December, apparently more than 50 percent of Zillow visits came from mobile. The company says that on weekends, mobile accounts for 60 percent of traffic. Overall, Zillow averaged 34.5 million unique monthly visitors for the quarter.

“The quarter capped off a pivotal year of tremendous growth and we’re looking forward to 2013 as we focus on three core priorities: attracting more users with great products and services; growing our Premier Agent business with unmatched value and tools; and accelerating our emerging mortgage, rental and home improvement marketplaces,” said CEO Spencer Rascoff in the earnings release.

In that vein, the release also notes that Zillow recently launched Digs, a Pinterest-style home improvement site, and that in the fourth quarter, it completed the acquisitions of mortgage software maker Mortech, rental site HotPads, and collaborative shopping platform Buyfolio.

Total revenue for 2012 was $116.9 million (up 77 percent) and total net income was $5.9 million (compared to $1.1 million in 2011).

Yesterday, newly public competitor Trulia released an earnings report that also beat estimates.

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Google just added a few more features to Google Now on Android 4.1+. Starting today, Android users will be able to see information from even more third-party services on Google Now, including movie ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, tickets you have purchased on Fandango and, if Google realizes you are looking for real estate, listings from Zillow.

Google has been expanding its list of Google Now features at a steady pace since the service launched last summer. This is the fourth major update to the service and, as Google notes, Now will “continue to get better at delivering you more of the information you need, before you even ask.”

The Rotten Tomatoes listings will appear in the regular movie card that Now already displays and the Fandango integration is similar to what Google is already doing with other reservations from its partners you may have for restaurants, flights, hotels and events.

The new Zillow card will show you nearby real estate listings when Google sees that you regularly look for real estate sites. It’s not clear how smart this card is (does Google know how much house you can afford?), but it will surely drive new traffic to Zillow and could turn out to be useful for those looking for a new home.

Until now, all of this information only lived in the dedicated Google Now screen on Android, but the team also just launched a Google Now widget in connection with the Google Search app that brings this information to the front and center on your home screen as well.

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It’s no secret that real estate site Zillow has been putting quite a bit of emphasis on the rental side of the housing market recently. Today, the company is expanding its portfolio of tools for rental professionals with the launch of its free property management websites for property managers and rental agents.

According to Zillow, the new service is aimed at rental professionals “who do not have their own website, wish to improve their current website or are looking for a free custom Web solution.” Zillow’s sites come in a variety of templates, themes and colors and are obviously tightly integrated with the rest of Zillow’s suite of rental tools. Any change an agent makes on Zillow Rental will immediately carry over to the new property management sites. The company also notes that its sites are search engine optimized and will offer “Rent vs. Buy” and “How Much is My Rent” calculators.

Obviously, these aren’t the world’s most exciting sites, but the point here is to help small businesses that wouldn’t otherwise have the know-how to be on the web online.

“At Zillow we’re focused on giving rental professionals the tools they need to attract and collaborate with prospective tenants,” said David Vivero, vice president of Zillow Rentals in a canned statement today. “Giving every property manager a beautiful search engine-optimized website is yet another way Zillow Rentals will help rental professionals get more exposure for their listings and fill their vacancies faster and more easily.”

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Zillow just announced that it has acquired the San Francisco-based rental and real estate search site HotPads for $16 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2012. This acquisition marks the first time that Zillow has acquired a primarily consumer-facing company and Zillow says it is making this acquisition to “expand the size of its growing rental audience and extend the reach of its marketing tools and productivity solutions for rental professionals.”

HotPads has been around for a while. The company launched in 2005, with a focus on rentals. It expanded to include real estate sales in 2007 and started including vacation rentals and hotels in 2009. The company, which competes with the likes of Trulia, Apartments.com, Craigslist and, of course, Zillow itself, raised $2.3 million in a Series A round led by Meakem Becker Venture Capital in 2007, but hasn’t raised any funding since. The company has 19 employees and will continue to operate from San Francisco and join the Zillow Rental Network once the acquisition has closed.

The basic idea here, as Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff told me earlier today, is to create one single database for rentals that will be available on Zillow, HotPads and the company’s other properties. HotPads, he stressed, will continue to exist as its own brand and Zillow will commit additional engineering resources to help the company grow.

HotPads, Zillow tells us, attracted about 2.8 million unique users in October. Nearly 70% of the listings these users looked at were apartments for rent. On Zillow, about 6 million users look at rentals each month according to the company’s own data.

Between Zillow Rentals and HotPads, Rascoff expects, the company can now offers a rentals marketplace at scale – something that wasn’t previously available to users in the highly fragmented rentals market. For Zillow, this is also an opportunity to build a relationship with a younger audience – the kind that’s shopping for a first rental apartment but not ready to buy yet. Once they get to the point where they are looking to buy, they will hopefully come back to the Zillow brand.

“This acquisition represents a significant step-change for Zillow Rentals, allowing us to dramatically increase the number of leads we send to landlords. HotPads has a younger, complementary and rental-focused audience. Now Zillow will become even more relevant to consumers at the beginning of their real estate life cycle,” said Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow in a canned statement today. “In addition, by acquiring an amazing engineering team, with a deep understanding of how people search for rentals and become tenants, we expect to accelerate our innovation and monetization of our rental marketplace.”

Zillow, of course, has lately made a number of investments in the growing online retail market, including the recent launch of its free marketplace with tools for rental professionals that was largely based upon the company’s June 2012 acquisition of rental relationship management service RentJuice. For Zillow, this is the sixth acquisition in the last two years. Just this month, the company announced its plans to buy mortgage technology company Mortech. In October, the company acquired Buyfolio and in June it acquired RentJuice. In 2011, it acquired Postlets and Diverse Solutions.

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Real estate site Zillow just released its third-quarter earnings report, once again coming in just ahead of what Wall Street analysts had predicted. The company said it saw $31.9 million in revenue and earnings of 8 cents per share in the quarter ending September 30. That’s up from revenue of $19.1 million and EPS of 2 cents during the same quarter last year.

Analysts had estimated that the company would earn 7 cents per share on revenue of $31.66 million. Net income, meanwhile, was $2.3 million, up from a loss of $0.6 million during the same quarter last year.

The company is also announcing the acquisition of mortgage software company Mortech, which we’ll cover in a separate post. Here’s the statement from CEO Spencer Rascoff:

Zillow had another great quarter with record usage across mobile and Web. In fact, we reached a major milestone recently, topping 1 billion home views on Zillow Mobile through the first three quarters of 2012. During the quarter we also expanded our suite of technology tools and services for professionals. Last week we announced the acquisition of Buyfolio, a collaborative shopping tool that can increase the conversion rates for agents, and further add value to our successful Premier Agent program. We’ve made another important leap today with the announcement of our planned acquisition of Mortech, which will further extend the services we provide to the mortgage industry.

More growth numbers: Zillow said it saw an average of 36.1 million unique visitors (across mobile and Web) during the quarter, an increase of 11.9 from last year. That includes a record high of 37 million in July. Meanwhile, the number of real estate agents paying for a premiere subscription increased 80 percent year-over-year, to 26,703.

Back in September, the company announced that it would be selling additional stock in a follow-on offering. In the past few weeks (after the close of the third quarter), Zillow has made a number of other announcements, including the addition of 1.2 million foreclosed and pre-foreclosure homes to its listings and the acquisition of shopping site Buyfolio.

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Real estate search giant Zillow has acquired Buyfolio, an online and mobile collaborative shopping platform where New York home shoppers can search, track, organize and discuss for-sale listings with their real estate agent, significant other or a private group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

This is Zillow’s fourth acquisition; the real estate company’s other purchases include RentJuice, and Postlets.

Buyfolio aims to make online shopping for a home easier and more organized, giving homebuyers a simple, real-time snapshot of their home search. Users can create a customized search and receive notifications when properties that meet their criteria come on the market. You can also save properties to a personalized folio to keep track of price changes, open houses, status changes, and more. The site also allows the buyer’s agent to add local knowledge, notes and additional listings.

Zillow says the acquisition furthers its strategy of adding tools and services for professionals and home buyers. Earlier this month, Zillow launched an ad-free marketplace for rental professionals and landlords based on its acquisition of RentJuice.

In particular, Zillow plans to offer Buyfolio’s online and mobile products to Zillow Premier Agents and brokerages nationwide (beyond New York City) to help real estate agents grow their business, and online presence.

Buyfolio’s founders also founded travel startup SeatGuru, which they sold to Expedia in 2007.

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Online real estate service Zillow is expanding its real estate listings today by adding “pre-market inventory” — specifically, homes that have either been foreclosed or are in the foreclosure process.

Increasing the selection of available homes is particularly important now, Zillow says, because the inventory of for-sale homes listed on the site has fallen by 20 percent over the past year. The company suggests that there’s already considerable interest from homebuyers in this kind of product, citing a study by the National Association of Realtors, which found that 55 percent of homeowners have considered purchasing a foreclosed home but don’t know how to find those listings or are discouraged by the complexity of the transaction.

The new listings are drawn from public records, Zillow says, and it looks like the vast majority (1.5 million) of them consist of pre-foreclosure homes, where foreclosure proceedings have been initiated or an auction has been scheduled. Another 250,000 listings are homes that are owned by the bank or lender but are not yet listed for sale. (Zillow also counts 147,000 “Make Me Move” properties — where homeowners aren’t planning to sell but list a dream price for their home — as part of its pre-market inventory.)

In addition to the normal home information (bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage and so on), Zillow will also include the estimated sale price and foreclosure details. The company will also be listing contact information for foreclosure specialists who can help with the process, and it’s launching a new Foreclosure Center with information about the foreclosure process.

“Zillow is taking information that was really only available to a select group – in this case, savvy investors – and making it more easily available to interested home buyers,” said Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff in a press release. “What’s more, bringing this information to light, and taking this inventory out of the shadows, can help bring these homes to market faster than ever before.”

Earlier this month, Zillow launched an ad-free marketplace for rental professionals and landlords, based on its acquisition of RentJuice.

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As the U.S. real estate market is slowly starting to gather some steam again, real estate portals like Redfin, Trulia and Zillow are again competing as important tools for prospective buyers who want to get an edge in competitive markets. According to a new study commissioned by real estate portal Redfin and real estate company Windermere, the quality of the listings on these different sites isn’t always up to par. According to this study, which looked at 11 major U.S. cities, Redfin and Windermere.com feature about 20 percent more listings than Zillow and Trulia and almost two out of five listings on those two sites are no longer for sale.

According to this study, broker sites tend to list houses seven to nine days before they appear on Zillow and Trulia and also record the sales of these houses long before these portals update their listings. Redfin comes out on top in this study, as only 0.1 percent of the houses in its database were already sold, compared to 37 percent on Trulia and 36 percent on Zillow.

Given that this study was sponsored by Redfin, those results shouldn’t be a surprise, but the company says its study was conducted by an “independent real estate technology consulting firm.”

Update: Zillow just sent us the following statement in response to Redfin’s study: ”There is no gold standard for listings data, so comparing Zillow’s MLS-only listings to an MLS isn’t going to give you the whole picture. For example, Zillow has hundreds of thousands of for-sale-by-owner, new construction and foreclosure listings, which often aren’t listed on an MLS. In addition to these listings, home shoppers visit Zillow for deep information on all homes, Zestimates, price cuts, communities, rental listings and historical home information, all of which typically can’t be found on a brokerage site. More than 36 million users came to Zillow’s site and mobile apps to research homes in August.”

Why does all of this matter? According to the latest data, the number of houses on the market today is down 29 percent since last year and, says Redfin, “you can’t afford to miss 20 percent of the listings” when there are already fewer homes on the market just as the number of buyers has finally started to pick up again.

The real estate market (which, by the way, could still use a good amount of disruption), is still mostly dominated by regional multiple listing services. Redfin, which operates in about a third of the U.S., is a full-blown online real estate brokerage with real estate agents and not “just” a portal, so it has access to these listings. Trulia, Zillow and its competitors have to get listings by asking the agents and their brokerages to post listings to their sites.

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After debuting on the NASDAQ last year, real estate search engine Zillow is filing a follow-on offering, seeking to sell 3.175 million shares of the company’s Class A common stock. An additional 325,000 shares of its Class A common stock will be sold in the offering by shareholders.

The company, whose shares closed at $42.43 today, saw record revenue in Q2 of $27.8 million, up 75 percent year over year. Zillow says it will use the proceeds from the sale for “general corporate purposes, which may include working capital, sales and marketing activities, general and administrative matters and capital expenditures.” Another use case for the funds—acquisitions.

Although Zillow has yet to price the offering, at $42.23 a share, the company could raise as much as $135 million.

The company acquired RentJuice earlier this year for $40 million.

Mobile has been huge for the company with more homes now viewed via Zillow on a mobile device than on a desktop. In July, 168 million homes were viewed on Zillow via a mobile device – that’s 63 homes per second. Average monthly unique users during the quarter grew to 33.5 million, up 61% year over year. July was another record traffic month with 37 million unique users visiting Zillow on mobile and Web.

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