Great real estate site, very unique

[sue1013]

I checked mine and it is definately last year 2005 county assessment. My 2006 county assessment is different. Our county does a new assessment every year. Mine only had property size and one story nothing more.

 

[DisneyLovingMama]

Mine is an actual estimate and pretty right on. My house has gained 48K in the last 15 months since I bought it. I figured closer to 60, based on the house across the street, but things have cooled off a bit here.

 

[CPM]

Cool! It came out to pretty much what I thought it would.

 

[Honu]

I looked up mine, but the satellite photo shows what looks like a big swimming pool over my neighbor's townhouses, which should look just like mine. The values look right though.

 

[stm61]

the house they show isn't my house. I don't even think it's the right street. If it is, it's about 25 yrs outdated.

 

[dcgrumpy]

It's been stated a couple of times, just wanted to point out again that these are assessed values....not appraisals.

actually the range it gives for my house are the exact numbers that my last two appraisals were for

 

[kristen821]

Very interesting.

 

[CajunDixie]

I guess my house doesn't exist. Actually, my whole town doesn't exist.

 

[Dan Murphy]

Neat article in today's Chicago Tribune........

Expedia creator fluffs his Zillow
House-valuation site may have Realtors tossing and turning

BY MARY UMBERGER
Published February 12, 2006


The man who helped shoot the travel-agency business between the eyes now has the real estate industry in his sights.

Richard Barton, 38, co-founder of the Expedia.com self-serve travel Web site, set off a year of speculation, occasionally bordering on hysteria, when he announced that he had secured $32 million for a real estate Web site called Zillow.

The news media, industry Web sites and bloggers spent months postulating that Zillow would be everything from a national multiple-listing service to an online transaction manager. Real estate agents fretted that he was about to put them out of a job, as Expedia had done to many travel agents.

At midnight Tuesday, Barton unleashed a test version of Zillow, and the response was so intense--300,000 page views between midnight and 7 a.m. Wednesday, Pacific time--that its servers crashed. Zillow spent most of Wednesday promising to be back later.

Zillow is a home-valuation tool that spits out "comps," or comparable market analyses, for buyers and sellers who want to know the worth of their homes--or their neighbors' homes.

It's hardly the first such online tool, but it may be the most elaborate. It claims a database of 60 million homes. That's 2 terabytes--2 trillion bytes--of information, and Zillow aims to nearly double that database to 110 million homes.

The site combines satellite and traditional mapping with transaction data from county governments to create a "Zestimate"--a home's purported value, mapped side-by-side with neighbors' homes. Users can enter data about their homes' improvements--remodeled kitchen, finished basement, etc.--to get a more refined guess.

While Zillow's 75-person staff in Seattle labored to keep the sluggish Zillow site running Thursday, Barton discussed how he sees the industry evolving.

Q. Why have you gone into the real estate business?

A. I started up Expedia at Microsoft in 1994, and at that time I was also waving my arms and jumping up and down about real estate, telling them it's another business where there's tons of information and people want to be empowered, it's not just travel. I was evangelical then.

I sold [Microsoft on] the idea of Expedia, and I was also on the team that developed Microsoft Home Advisor (an early online listings site).

Q. Home Advisor was a very expensive flop for Microsoft. Why didn't it work?

A. It was early. The industry and consumers weren't ready for it. The industry wasn't even ready to put listings on the Internet in 1995. The Realtors and travel agents and stockbrokers weren't ready for their information to be cracked open and made available to the world. It took a while for the industry to understand that the Internet is an incredible marketing opportunity and customer-acquisition opportunity.

Q. Expedia spun out of Microsoft in 1999 as a public company and you became CEO. Then, Barry Diller's USA Interactive bought it for $3 billion in 2003. You were clearly set for life. Why did you come back and delve into real estate?

A. I took a year off and went to Italy with my family. It was great. I didn't think about business. After a year of battery-recharging and connecting with the family, we came back to Seattle.

My good friend Lloyd Frink, who I worked with at Expedia, was ready to start a business. He said, "Let's brainstorm." We looked at a couple of things.

We were both house-hunting. We caught ourselves creating spreadsheets of house values. We're spreadsheet geeks. If you work hard at it, you can find historical sales information from your Realtor and put it on a spreadsheet and compare on a dollars-per-square-foot basis, which is an interesting metric.

We said, hey, why is this so hard? Why should you have to be a spreadsheet geek to figure this out? Why isn't there some kind of Kelley Blue Book for homes? We slapped our heads and said, "Why don't we do this?"

Q. There are several home-valuation sites out there. Why did you think we need another one?

A. The big difference is that anybody can come in and see the value of every house that we have.

You don't have to register, you don't have to give us your phone number. The stuff that's out there today oftentimes is really trying to get to you to come and give your e-mail address. The main purpose is to just share enough info as possible in order to sell you to a Realtor.

That's a viable business and quite clever, but we know from our focus groups that it isn't what people want. People want to get smart before they talk to a Realtor.

Q. You've been quoted as saying that you foresee real estate agents being moved from the center of the transaction to the outside because information-empowered consumers will need less involvement from service providers. Will this push commissions down?

A. The commission-based business model is under a great deal of pressure because of the work people are doing for themselves [to buy and sell homes] and because of the amount that homes have appreciated.

The California Association of Realtors has done a study [that said that] somebody using the Internet in the transaction spent 1.94 weeks with an agent before making an offer, versus a traditional buyer, who would spend seven weeks with a Realtor before making an offer.

That, to me, is a great illustration of the gap. That compensation system today pays both of those service providers the same amount, but it's clearly not the same amount of work.

We're not trying to be a real estate agent with Zillow. It's different from Expedia, where we absolutely were a travel agent and we replaced and were competing with travel agents. We don't believe the real estate agent is going to be replaced.

There's zero commission in travel today, but 10 years ago travel agents were getting 10 percent commissions, at least in airline tickets. We don't have any plan like that here. What is similar is consumers are hungry for more information and for being empowered with tools.

Our business model is [to generate revenue through] advertising [instead of through agents paying the site for leads]. If you squint your eyes, advertisements are lead generators. We're challenging the way lead generators charge today.

Q. So back to commissions. Will that model disappear?

A. I don't know. We're entering a period in this industry where there's going to be lots of experimentation. I'm pretty sure that new models are going to emerge, but that doesn't mean the old model is going to be wiped out.

Again, I have no interest in Zillow, just thought it a very neat concept, and right on in many areas, obviously has some growing pains to overcome also.

 

[Tink&SquirtsMom]

It was dead on for my development and my moms neighborhood. The part I like best about it is you can get decent comps without you providing any info, other sites I've seen you can only get one comp at a time or you have to give all your info and then they solicit you for refis or such.

 

[tar heel]

Mine is not assessed value either. I know what my assessed value is now and what it was before the last assessment. This figure is lower than either of those and also lower than what we paid for it in 1997. That also seems to be the case with the other houses on my street.

 

[vetrik]

I would have enjoyed this site - DH and I are house hunting now, but they only have 1 county available in my state. Maybe someday they'll expand to have more of RI.

 

[ead79]

It valued my parents’ house off of the “tax assessed value.” Not being a homeowner myself, I don’t know if that’s the same as what the house is worth. If so, let’s just say that this site could not have been more wrong. They said the tax assessed value for my parents’ house was $94,000. The house across the street from my parents just sold for $325,000 a few years ago, so I’d say they are pretty far off. I sure wish you could get a house in the Atlanta area for $94,000! It was still interesting though.

 

[Feralpeg]

The photos are at least a couple of years old. The spot where my house is shows a vacant lot. It does show some houses built prior to mine with current values. I wonder how they go about making the determination.

 

[Boater]

The estimate of the value of the houses in our area in Florida was just a bit high but pretty close. Really cool site though for getting a general idea of what properties are going for what amount in a neighborhood.

Thanks for posting this!

Where were you looking? They were very low in our neighborhood, $100,000 or more around my home.
But it's fun to look at.

 

[brerrabbit]

From what I know about my house and how this site apparently works I would say that the numbers are definitly assessed values and not tax appraised values. They are probably getting the square footage numbers from the appraisal districts but the first problem is that it only lists my first floor square footage and therefore underlists my house by 1,500 sq ft. The house next door is 2,000 sq ft on one level and is valued $25,000 less than my house. I think this type of tool can certainly develop for areas that are very similar houses. What some call tract homes are almost always valued per sq ft based on sales in the last six months. Very little variance is made for condition of the house. In areas of custom homes and homes with land the tool will probably never be effective because so much of a homes price is based on subjective factors and its hard to compare one to another. When I took real estate classes they said that comparibles used to determine a houses value should be in the same neighborhood built within two years of the subject house and be within 200 sq ft of the subject house. The only place this works is subdivisions where tract type homes exsist. Additionally (at least in my area) a huge factor for determining value is , is it in a hundred year flood plan. Houses at the end on my street are in the flood plan and they are valued $40,000 more than mine and I can assure you that is wrong and the reason that two of the house down there have been on the market for over six months.

 

[dcgrumpy]

All they had for my house was the lot size. It didn't list beds, baths, sq footage etc..

I clicked on the "refine value of home" link and put in all the correct information. The Zestimate went up by $350K . Yeah I wish

 

[jgmklmhem]

It has most of the houses in my neighborhood around a million each which I know is very far from the truth. Most are really about 250,000. Weird how they could be sooooooo far off.

 

[skiwee1]

Cool! It was very accurate on price too!

 

[A4Disney]

Saw this on the local news here this evening. What a neat site to look at real estate, yours, the neighborhood, anywhere.

http://www.zillow.com/

May be the next Google. Give it a look, put in your own home, or the area you would like to move to.

Thank you that's so cool!