A lot of hype surrounded the fact that Rich Barton (who created Expedia in 1994 and helped put a lot of travel agents out of business) was aiming for the real estate industry with the help of venture capitalists.
More power to him. It will help weed out the bad agents, in my opinion (if he succeeds).
His newest project is called Zillow (www.zillow.com) and it's currently up in its Beta form (and has been since Wednesday the 8th). It hasn't been up too many days, but I think it's going to put useless websites like HouseValues.com out of business. Especially since it's gives you an estimate of your home's value without collecting information or selling your information. Zillow already knows!
In my hour or so of playing around with their website, I thought it was great. Extremely user friendly, and most of the information was accurate, although in most cases, a little on the "low" side.
A few examples of the homes I found were...
* My mom's old house that we are just about to put on the market. Zillow says it's worth $440,000. However, it's in immaculate shape and has had a lot of remodeling / landscaping / updating done. My mom was hoping to list it for closer to $500K (although we're still debating). Now I'm not saying Zillow was inaccurate. In fact, when I clicked on the link for "More Information", it gave me a range that said depending on the condition, it could be anywhere from $405,000 to $485,000. That was a little more promising.
* A house in my mom's old neighborhood that was for sale. The asking price was $450,000 and it received an offer pretty quickly. Zillow said it should be worth $450,000. I was surprised how accuate that was.
* Most of the homes in the Talus neighborhood of Issaquah are less than 3 years old and were about $575,000 and up back when they were brand new. Nowadays, the asking price is closer to $700,000 to $850,000. However, Zillow thought most of these homes were still in the mid-$500K range, which is impossible since the tax assessed value on most of those homes is at least $600,000. This was the only questionable data I saw. Of course it probably had to do with the fact that the homes are so new.
* A house I worked on in Puyallup was valued at $190,000. Strangely, I sold it for $205,000 about 5 months ago. The information on Zillow said it was a 4 bedroom house with baseboard heating. My friends and I actually made it a 3 bedroom house with an office and converted it to a furnace / forced air heating system. So little things like that will probably need time to update.
* Lastly, some homes that have been on the market for months (in some cases, almost a year), are asking for about $100K to $200K more than Zillow thinks they should be worth. Go figure.
All in all, even when the information wasn't completely accurate, I thought it was great as a comparative tool. I could see what other homes in the neighborhood might sell for relative to a specific target.
As a real estate agent, I think it's a great tool. Maybe this website will expand to include realtors, or to get rid of them (by allowing sellers to contact each other). We'll see! But for now, check it out, see what your home is worth.
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