zillow

SEATTLE--Many homeowners use Zillow to get a quick sense of how much their house is worth, the mega-rich included.

Speaking at a conference for Microsoft's top digital advertisers, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said he has even used the site to check the value of his lavish home. "Oh yeah," Gates said. However, he said Zillow's estimate is far too low.

"If you bid that number on my house I won't sell it to you," Gates said. He noted that Zillow's technology, while it does make good use of Microsoft's Virtual Earth … Read more

Zillow is launching a few important community features on Wednesday. The sexy new addition is Home Q&A: Zillow will now let users ask questions about any property on the map. Anyone can answer them. Presumably, real estate agents will be the ones doing most of the answering, both to make homes sell more quickly and to appear knowledgeable to buyers who are interested in other properties they are representing. Homeowners, or anyone else for that matter, also can answer questions the community poses. All answers can be rated for helpfulness.

Home Q&A questions will appear on the Zillow front page, but at launch they won't be geographically targeted: you'll see a selection of all the questions on the system, not the ones relevant to your location. Zillow said it is moving toward launching a personalized home page, though.

The less sexy, but more important feature for the real estate industry, is Zillow's new user profile pages. Again, this will likely be populated by agents, since it's where all of a user's answers, questions, and helpfulness ratings will be aggregated. A buyer could get a pretty good feel for the knowledge and attitude of an agent on one of these user pages. The analysis on an agent won't be as deep as it would be with a rating tool like My-Currency (review), but since the community on Zillow is much larger and more engaged than on any upstart real estate site, it's still likely to be very useful. Zillow spokespersons estimate that of the site's four million visitors a month, 150,000 are agents. I don't think it will be too long before most of them set up user pages on Zillow, creating what is essentially a new directory of real estate agents -- but with user ratings attached to them.

There's also a fantastic new self-serve advertising system. I say fantastic because I'm tired of seeing Google's ads everywhere -- Google's service, while effective, isn't specialized for particular industries. Zillow's ad system will allow ZIP code-targeted advertising for agents, homes for sale, or local services companies, and the rates are reasonable: a penny a view, for a little ad with a graphic in it. (Zillow will still use Google ads for "fill-in," I was told.)

Finally, any user on Zillow can now flag a home as "for sale." That's something buyers' agents are likely to do, and it's a sneaky way to get around the fact that Zillow can't use the real estate industry's incumbent listing service, the MLS. After a home is flagged, the owner or agent can "take over" the listing, or, presumably, reverse it if the home is not in fact for sale.

Zillow is one of best examples of what Web 2.0 can be: It's got useful and unique data, it's fun and addictive to use, and with these changes it becomes even more of a community site. Plus, unlike most other Web 2.0 experiments, Zillow is becoming a central player in a market where there's real money changing hands.

More Zillow-supplied screenshots after the jump.

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My-Currency.com, launching at Demo 07 on Thursday, is a complicated solution to a very simple problem: people can't tell if real estate agents are any good.

My-Currency is designed to bust through friends' recommendations and real-estate advertising campaigns in order to help you find the agents with the best knowledge of their market, as shown by how well they predict the outcomes of real estate transactions.

The site is built around a prediction market. It asks agents to predict how much properties will sell for. Agents "wager their reputation," and put in their predicted sales price … Read more

To many in the real estate establishment, Zillow appeared to embody all the threats of online displacement that the industry feared most when the site was unveiled earlier this year. Yet, for all its potential and the addictive nature of its mashups, it wasn't obvious to us how such services would make money other than advertising revenue.

Now, another online real estate challenger has answered at least part of that question. Viewr uses AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies to go where Zillow and others seem to have left off (at least for now) in its quest to &… Read more

To say that start-up Zillow has created a buzz in the real-estate industry could be one of the understatements of the year. It has already generated so much interest, in fact, that at least one blog (HouseHunting 101) has begun tracking what other blogs are saying about it.

Why so much interest? Easy. Even though other realty sites have been around for awhile, Zillow raises the bar significantly by crunching its own numbers and coming up with a potential price tag for your home--something that sellers usually pay real estate agents for. But Zillow also raises the prospect of providing … Read more