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Zillow, the company working to be the information portal for all things real estate, has released a new feature for the cities of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pheonix, and South Florida. The new feature is a series of quarterly reports that illustrate the marketplace in great detail for those who geek out on real estate.

So you ask, why do this when the MLS puts out essentially the same reports? Well, the MLS report only shows what is sold via the MLS. It does not count for sale by owners transactions which are comprising more and more of the marketplace.

Zillow started out in beta and developed a cadre of critics who were looking for perfection. But it looks like their strategy of collecting and assimilating data and reformating it into a style that the average person can use is a great idea. If the advertising income can support the work that Zillow is doing, it may be the next big thing in real estate.

The Seattle online real estate company just introduced a series of quarterly reports on home values in five cities: Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and South Florida. Zillow spokeswoman Amy Bohutinsky said the company is sitting on “a mountain of data about millions of homes” and wanted to present some of the interesting trends that emerge when one starts slicing and dicing the data.
For example, the Seattle report (PDF) shows a 12.2 percent appreciation in single family homes for a three county area during the second quarter and indicates that seven Seattle neighborhoods — Windermere, Broadview, Bryant, Denny-Blaine, Wedgewood, Westlake and Viewridge — had appreciation of more than 40 percent. (Homes in the downtown and Broadway neighborhoods actually showed a slight depreciation in value).
Bohutinsky said the reports provide a more “comprehensive” snapshot of what is occurring in the market than the MLS. That’s because Zillow takes into consideration all homes in a neighborhood, not just those homes which were sold through the MLS.

Zillow releases mountains of data.

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