Thing 19: Zillow

Winning first place in the Web 2.0 Award's Real Estate category, Zillow http://www.zillow.com/  is a really useful tool that I could see sharing with customers looking to buy or sell a home.  First off, Zillow allows  you to enter an address and see the sales history for that property, ie:  if you are buying, you can find out what the current owner paid and when.  Zillow also gives buyers and sellers context by listing what have homes sold for in a given area, using a map-based format.  If you're buying, you can also enter detailed search criteria:  number of bathrooms and bedrooms, price range, zip code, type of dwelling, etc.  Zillow could potentially affect the real estate profession the way sites like expedia and travelocity have affected travel agents, rendering them nearly obsolete.  Thanks to Zillow, and sites like it, any potential buyer and seller can do a lot of research on his or her own to yield very useful information about how to approach a real estate purchase or sale.  And you can also pull up information that would be useful when just starting to think about buying a home, like where open houses are in a given neighborhood, etc.

On the downside, just as most of us find Mapquest to be lacking something in terms of suggested routes in areas that we know well, it is easy to find that Zillow has quite a few errors.  All I had to do was look up my own house to know that I shouldn't take what I see on Zillow as gospel.  In addition to not listing the number of bedrooms at all, it showed an incorrect number of bathrooms, and couldn't account for things like our installation of central air conditioning.  They do have a feature where you can send in information about your home, but I probably wouldn't do this unless we were putting it up for sale.  Zillow's value estimates are probably affected by missing and incorrect information like this though, which compromises its value to a degree.  Also, when I clicked on the "view listing website," (which normally takes you to the realtor's write up) for one home that caught my eye, it turned out that it was no longer for sale.  So, unless or until Zillow can resolve some of these problems, I suppose realtors will be remain in business for at least awhile!