Entries Tagged 'Zillow' ↓
January 10th, 2008 — 2008 Real Estate Predictions, Real Estate, Real Estate Internet, Real Estate Sales, Real Estate Tools, Zillow
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In what will be a benefit for real estate agents and brokers, the major online real estate listing aggregators have agreed upon a common XML based listing standard for listings. The format will be designed to be interoperable with the Real Estate Transaction Standards (RETS). Think of it, write it once, publish it many times. That is what in a nutshell technology offers going back to the original printing press.
Social networking has been immersed in this battle with the emergence of Facebook as a leader in the field. Google has led the way with OpenSocial to find a common way for people to create their social networking information once and then propagate the information out amongst other networks.
The online real estate community has decided to take it one step further with all of the major players joining forces to provide a common ground for online listings. I do not know, but my initial reaction is that this is the first salvo in the online war against the MLS’s. If 80 percent of home searches start online and the new standard can create a national online repository for the information, what will stop them from creating the fields that the MLS has for agents and not the public and offering this as a free alternative.
The battle 5 years from now will be about speed, quality, and openess instead of systems that lock you in. Zillow has led the way in this department and is forcing the real estate industrial complex to open their doors much faster than they had planned.
Interesting times…
In addition to Yahoo! Real Estate, Zillow and Trulia, several other leading online real estate sites have agreed to adopt the standard, including Homes.com, Homescape, Oodle, Point2 Technologies, RealEstate.com, Vast.com, and vFlyer.
“It’s to the advantage of everyone in the industry to adopt a common publishing format,” said Jorrit Van der Meulen, vice president, partner relations at Zillow.com. “We want to make it as easy as possible for our partners to get their listings in front of home buyers.”
The companies participating in the new standard will work in close collaboration with the Real Estate Standards Organization to ensure that the data specification interoperates with the Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS). via PR
More on this from:
November 14th, 2007 — Zillow
Zillow is fast working on becoming the DE facto portal for the online industry. Their latest stab at online dominance is partnering with the 282 newspapers to provide the online listing information and other housing information online. This is a wise move for Zillow as it will further brand the portal in the minds of buyers and sellers as the place to start the real estate sales process online.
What these newspapers give up is their dominant position in the online world for real estate in their local markets. With an estimated 80 percent of home searches started online, very few people are looking in the newspapers for real estate information these days. The pressure to use newspaper classified advertising comes mainly from sellers wanting it as part of the marketing package, not the agents as it is lost dollars due to the utter ineffectiveness of newspaper marketing in selling a home.
So even as Zillow will be a player in a declining market now, they will be sucking the last vestiges of life out of the market for their partner newspapers. One of the benefits for the newspapers is that when people do a Google search for real estate in their local market, they do fairly well. Now they have essentially co-opted their search engine optimization to Zillow and taken themselves out of the online market even further.
Instead of holding the top position for real estate searches online in their local markets and generating traffic and advertising revenue the newspapers will now see Zillow as the top position on Google diverting traffic from their sites. With Zillow developing their brand as they have and the local newspaper giving up their dominant position, all they will see is declining online traffic to match their declining readership in the real estate niche.
Just another reason for real estate agents to tell their clients that they will not pay the high advertising fees to be in a newspaper and just go to Zillow directly. Which I am sure in Zillow’s long term plan.
Is it time for the evil cackle to be heard coming out of Seattle?
Eleven newspapers companies are involved in this partnership, which is an extension of the Yahoo alliance. The companies are the following: Hearst Newspapers, Lee Enterprises, Media General, MediaNews Group, Morris Communications, Paddock Publications, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, E.W. Scripps, Times-Shamrock Communications, Journal Register Co., and the Day Publishing Co.
“We are honored that this consortium of newspaper companies has chosen Zillow as the partner to fast-track their presence in the digital real estate world,” Lloyd Frink, president of Zillow, said in a statement. “Research shows that 80% of home buyers use the Internet in the home-buying process.” via Editor and Publisher
June 16th, 2007 — Zillow
Zillow this week announced the addition to their stable of products Broker Feeds, which “will allow brokers to automatically upload listings to the site and keep those listings up to date”. Presently there is the capacity to enter this information manually but Zillow in it’s quest for constant improvement is working on creating long term systems to make it a no brainer to enter the information.
Industry Commentary of Zillow Broker Feeds:
October 25th, 2006 — Zillow
That Zillow will be making a major announcement in the next few days. Robert Scoble, video blogger and networking guru, teased a major new announcement on his blog last night. He was filming a segment for his new show and offered this on his blog.
Look for an announcement from them to show up on TechCrunch soon. Soon being within days. I don’t break news anymore, I just do videos.
Anyway, they have the nicest offices in the Web 2.0 world that I’ve seen so far. They are in the Wells Fargo building in downtown Seattle on the 46′th floor and have stunning views that wrap around all sides of the building.
He said that TechCrunch will be announcing it so that tells me it will be a technical tool for the site, but beyond that I am guessing.
Do you have a guess? Let me know in the comments.
 Update: The answer came out Thursday morning, it is a public API that anyone can use to add Zillow information to their websites.
September 20th, 2006 — Zillow
It looks like Zillow is now allowing users to provide their own data to help get homes closer to the appraised value. It seems that there is a good deal of remodeling and modifications being made to homes that are not showing up on the tax records that Zillow gets their information from.
Irony would be the tax assessors looking for modifications done in the Zillow database and then following up and raising the taxes on these properties. The law of unitended consequences at work.
Zillow uses a combination of proprietary algorithms and public records like assessors’ valuations and sales filings to arrive at the valuations they place on the 68 million U.S. homes in the company’s database.
“We’ve received loads of feedback since our launch from homeowners who want to be able to publish things they know about their own homes, such as a kitchen remodel, a view or deck addition, that we aren’t able to glean from public records,” said Rich Barton, Zillow co-founder and CEO, according to a company statement.
One Zillow user who found the service’s listings weren’t entirely accurate was none other than Barton himself. Barton, who has his home for sale, became the site’s first user to make his property offering more accurate.
“In my case the public records say that my house has 2.25 bathrooms, when there are really 3.5,” Barton said on his blog, “Zillow now presents my facts side-by-side with the public record facts. Additionally, I was able to publish My Estimate of my home’s value letting any prospective buyers know that we remodeled” via TechWeb
Zillow Blog on the changes.
August 29th, 2006 — Real Estate Tools, Zillow
The real estate portal on Yahoo has a new cleaner look today. And that is not the whole enchilada as the real power in the make over is under the hood. It is recieving a boost in the information that it is offering customer in partnering with Prudential Real Estate and most importantly Zillow to supply a depth of data that Realtor.com is not prepared to compete with.
Here is my question. If realtor.com does not innovate and continues to lose market share, and home searches continue to migrate to the web, at what point do the realtors get restless with the conditions that realtor.com puts on them and flee the site?
Much of the new content at Yahoo Real Estate is being provided by property research start-up Zillow Inc. of Seattle and Prudential Real Estate.
Sunnyvale-based Yahoo’s (NASDAQ:YHOO) real estate site has dropped from the 5th most visited of its kind to No. 9 in the past year, according to Hitwise. Zillow’s site is ranked No. 5, while the official site of the National Association of Realtors has hung on to its top spot, despite its market share slipping from 12 percent to 10 percent.
via the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal:.
August 15th, 2006 — Zillow
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.
July 20th, 2006 — Zillow
In an interesting move, Yahoo Real Estate has worked out a deal with Zillow to provide access to the new information site. While still in Beta and not fully prepared to be a definitive indicator of housing value, Zillow is becoming a force in the online real estate world. When Zillow gets out of beta, it now has the presense with this deal to be a dominant force and drive a great deal of traffic and advertising dollars through the site.
Visitors to Yahoo Real Estate can now use Zillow’s software to look up and compare real-estate values, Yahoo announced Wednesday. Along with an approximation of a home’s value, the Zillow software provides indicators showing value fluctuations over the past week, as well as graphs that chart changes over the past year.
Not everyone can find their home value through Zillow or its partnership with Yahoo Real Estate, however. While data on more than 65 million homes is available, some states–such as Indiana, Texas and Louisiana–are left out entirely due to nondisclosure laws, and some counties and individual homes are not yet in the database.
Seattle-based Zillow was launched in February 2006 by two members of the original team behind travel site Expedia: Richard Barton and Lloyd Frink. It uses a proprietary formula based primarily on public records to generate its “Zestimate” of a home’s approximate market value. From that, it can create a “Zindex” median house value for a given geographic area on a particular day.
Yahoo Real Estate strikes deal with Zillow | Tech News on ZDNet.
June 22nd, 2006 — Real Estate, Zillow
I found this via “The Walk-Through” and was caught somewhere between amazed and horrified. The Brady Bunch House is a real house and is worth over 1 million dollars according to Zillow.
While not an earth shattering revelation, this still is fun in a nostalgic way reminding me of the childhood crush on Marsha and wondering where Alice lived? Speaking of that, the home has only 2 bedrooms and 3 baths according to Zillow.
That must have been one cozy living arrangement for the whole “Brady Bunch”. Lets see 2 parents, 6 children, Alice, and Cousin Oliver on occasion. hmmmm…
To see other famous homes, visit the Zillow Famous Homes page with such homes as the Beverly Hillbillies Mansion, the Playboy Mansion, and many others.
April 14th, 2006 — Commercial Real Estate, New Construction, Zillow
Zillow is adding overhead and sideways mapping using the same technology found in Microsoft’s Virtual Earth product. Instead of seeing the rooftops of homes as most mapping programs provide, the Zillow product will show 45 degree angles of the homes and properties giving prospects the opportunity to get a much better view of the property they are interesting.
The images, which are provided by Microsoft’s mapping application, Virtual Earth, offer a panoramic view of homes from four directions at a 45-degree angle. At present, images are available only in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Boston, and Seattle.
The actual pictures are taken by Pictometry International, a five-year-old startup that specializes in digital, oblique aerial imaging. The company offers its technology to government agencies such as Homeland Security and corporations such as Seattle-based Zillow. via RED HERRING
More Coverage of Zillow’s New Visual Here
