Zillow Has Competition

“The name isn’t as cool…”

it’s obviously easier to remember and that’s all that counts

I agree with BillyG. Zillow is a very poor name, one that I can’t remember because it has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

At first glance, I’m impressed with the accuracy of the results. ABC produced much better figures for my neighborhood than zillow did.

I found more properties on Zillow than ABC. The “adjust value” feature may be unique to ABC, but how much value could it provide? Who’s putting in the information? Most likely interested parties. Nowhere near as reliable as actual sales/assessed/tax numbers from public docs. Those are the metrics by which to compare the sites and, at least for the neighborhood I tested, Zillow had more data.

I love this site. My house is valued $1.5M too high, can I sell it? And one up the street is valued at $1M less than they just paid. Zillow has the right number for both houses. Not very accurate in the Boston area.

Zillow has an adjust value feature too.

“a mashup site is going to try to make a go at creating a real business, they need to build in proprietary features that are not easily duplicated before the competition arrives”

Michael — Web 2.0 in a nutshell.

Best,

PR

Hi,

have you tried this one:
http://immo.search.ch
if you like AJAX you will love it. It´s a site in german, but the UI is so intuitive that you shouldn´t have any problems.

Speaking of real estate: a cool property search engine is “Extate, with lots of ajax, tags, and other web 2.0 stuff, but is UK only for now.

Neither has my home, but I’m only in the capital of Illinois.

I like two things about this site:

#1 - It seems to be more accurate (Zillow was low nearly 250k on my house)

#2 - It’s easier to update a property (don’t need to go through multiple screens).

Anyway you look at it I’m glad this information is out there.

One glaring issue: The sites use official appraiser pricing info, which is usally way off the ‘real’ sellable price.

Thank you so much!! REABC gave us a much more accurate estimate of the value of our home and it was easy to use.

REABC is so easy. The customization tools allow better valuation information.

Love zillow but the numbers seem a bit suspect - this visual design of this site…not so good.

The introduction of a competitor in the space will only help out consumers and end users.

Pros & cons to both realestateabc and zillow. I’d use both if I was in the market. I DID notice some minor display problems on the Linux version of Firefox v1.5.0.1. Windows version is fine.

The site works in Safari and Zillow doesn’t! 10 points for RealEstateABC.

Zillow looks slicker, REABC seems to be more accurate.

Really, the killer app for real estate is going to be a compilation of what zillow/REABC is doing PLUS Trulia/Propsmart PLUS Redfin. Something that provides value to both sellers and buyers, and most importantly, takes marginalizes the middleman (real estate agents).

You won’t be able to take the real estate agent/broker out of the equation completely, but you can increase the value to the seller/buyer by decreasing their costs and making it easier to find and buy property.

Good review by the way.

well, i had a friend that made this web site http://www.streeteasy.com i think it is very cool

Have you seen HomePages.com? Combination of home listings, recently-sold homes, home valuations, neighborhood information, and aerial imagery. Cool…www.homepages.com

REABC does a real nice job w/ simple ui & deep content. Much more likely that people will learn REABC quickly & then stay there. Like the sliders alot - always had a problem w/ not being able to customize on Z.

I wonder the accuracy of numbers shown by these sites. The difference is value between these two sites are too much to believe the numbers that they display.

Guys, focus on your core strength other than cool names or cool interface… all these coolness will be worth penny if you do not provide any value (in your case accurate value)!! I would rather have craigslist kind of look and feel… wake up…

From what my mom tells me (shes’s a real estate appraiser), sites like this and Zillow don’t always properly use comparables and sales data to gauge the value of a house. Like some have said, sometimes the values come in way under and in other cases they come in way over.

From what she tells me, she dreads the day these start being used heavily by people trying to sell their homes or refinance. People get very angry when you tell them their home isn’t worth as much as they think it is. With sites like these popping up everywhere and completely missing figures much of the time, there could be a lot of angry home owners.

All I can say is ABCRE nailed my home value. Zillow was off by about 60%.

RealEstate ABC has a lot deeper content than Zillow. Articles on buying, selling, tips & hints, calculators, glossary, agent directory, all kinds of stuff.

Real estate agents are no longer “middlemen.” Is an attorney just a “middleman” between a plaintiff and a defendant? Is a doctor just a middleman between a patient and a cure? No, they are valued for their experience and knowledge of their field. People may not like it, but they need them.

People need to realize that experienced real estate agents are more than “keepers of data.” They are experts in the market. All of this info has been out there in tax records and available to the public for a long time now. No computer program using raw numbers and a seller’s overinflated opinion of their property will ever replace a knowledgable agent who has inspected the competion properties, knows the condition and amenities and is out there working with buyers and knows what they want.

An agent’s value isn’t in a database, it’s in their head - knowledge and experience. To believe that these tools will replace that is folly. These things make an experienced agent no less valuable any more than WebMD could make a doctor less valuable.

Unfortunately, there are too many pretenders out there that don’t know anything and aren’t worth any more than Zillow or ABC. And the common person doesn’t know what they don’t know.

Well, they need to get their data straight. I put in my address and REABC pinpointed a house across the street and down about 6 or 7 houses!

@Kristin,

Actually, real estate agents are middlemen, just like attorneys. They facilitate a transaction/interaction between two parties.

Having said that, real estate agents do provide a valuable service. Much of that value is derived from their understanding of the current market, and much of it is experience with how to do all the paperwork. So, if you can provide most of the market information (data by Zillow/REABC) that people can find out on their own. Add in a system where people can search for homes for sale (Ex: Trulia) and then actually make the purchase (Ex: Redfin), then the value of the real estate agent is diminished.

Do you still need a real estate agent? Sure (probably), but the value they provide is no longer worth 3-7%.

Will most Americans go through a mostly-automated system? Probably not, let’s say that maybe only 1% of buyers/sellers do this. That is still 1% of a $60 BILLION dollar real estate commission industry (just commissions). That’s pretty big and worth building a business model around.

Yes, the valuations are too high. Both Zillow and Real Estate ABC do not take into account that, in some markets, you cannot compare pricing from beyond the past 3-6 months.

I really liked what Terry did with RealEstateABC.com back when he started it! Now, it sure is taking on a whole new approach if they do indeed go ahead with this home valuation thing. Congrats to you Terry (and I hope your new endeavor -HomeSurfer.com - will be just as successful.

To hash-

I will reply because I think it adds to the discussion of tools being offered like this.

You are following the common misconception that a real estate agent’s value is in having that information.

Until you get into a difficult transaction, it’s easy to see why people feel that way. But referring to agents as “middlemen” (like it is a bad thing) implies that all they do is bring buyers and sellers together. That hasn’t been the case for many years - since laws required agents to represent one party and look out for that party’s best interests. THAT is more like a lawyer or doctor. Now agents aren’t just selling things, they are representing people. BIG DIFFERENCE.

Yes, they are technically “middlemen” but just about ANY profession is a “middleman.” The way it is said about agents is like it’s a bad thing.

Why not cut out the middleman doctor and do the surgury yourself? Why not represent yourself in court? Why not fix your own car, make your own dinner, do your own taxes, replace your own roof…. See my point? All of these people are “middlemen” between a consumer and the service they want completed.

Sales info has been around in the form of public tax records for years. Listings have been available online for years. Anyone can post a free ad in craigslist or on hundreds of unrepresented seller websites. But just because you know what other houses sold for doesn’t mean that you know how your house compares and what to price your house for. But that is just the beginning of selling. And just because you found the house online doesn’t mean that it is a smart investment.

People are controlled by emotion and most of the time, agents are protecting people from themselves. This outmoded idea of agents as shady salespeople has got to be stopped. There’s a big difference between someone who is trying to sell you something and someone who is required by law to represent you and look out for your best interests.

Assuming an EXPERIENCED agent’s value is in showing houses or popping a sign on the lawn is a big mistake. Many agents spend a large part of their time talking people out of buying the WRONG house or trying to show a seller that they can get more money for their house if they make a few simple and cheap changes - yet they get a fight all along the way.

Besides, agents have been providing FREE home valuations to sellers and showing buyers houses for FREE for decades. Why do more of the work yourself when you can have an expert do it for you - and be 100 times more accurate than an online service?

No matter what numbers are provided in tax assessment records and sales figures, a computer program will never be able to tell that buyers will deduct from the price because the property backs up to railroad tracks or has a disjointed floor plan or is on a busy corner or has a gas station across the street or has hideous wallpaper. Sellers ALWAYS think their house is better than their neighbor’s and cannot look at their property objectively. And buyers will always be polite and never tell an owner that they think the hot pink carpet that the seller is so proud to have installed himself and sees as “added value” is really a turn off.

No, people may see this as “doing the work themselves” but it will only make more work for the agents, trying to counteract misinformation and educate the public that a property’s value is more than square footage, number of rooms and what the house down the street sold for.

So I fail to see where the agent’s value is diminished when they have been doing these services for free, anyhow. How can you deduct for a service that you weren’t charged for in the first place?? And like Steve’s appraiser- mother mentioned, it will only make appraiser’s and agent’s job all the more difficult.

So, to say that agent’s value is diminished by an online service is like saying WebMD diminishes the value of doctors because people can self-diagnosis or NoLawyer diminishes the value for a lawyer when you really need one. Would a doctor charge less when you come in and say “I know what I have!” or would a lawyer charge less because you come in and say “I know my rights!” I highly doubt it.

These are just fancy bells and whistles to impress and have no more value than an online mortgage calculator. That can give you an idea of how much you can borrow, but it can’t know all of the loan programs available to you and hidden costs of the lending process.

Besides, as an agent in Atlanta pointed out to me, who are the real middlemen here? Many of these online providers offer consumers “free” information and once they have your contact info, they sell it to the highest bidder - of real estate agents. That’s how LendingTree gets “agents to compete” and HouseValues collects consumer info and sells it back to the agents - from a monthly fee to as much as 30% of the commission! If nothing else, these “middlemen” (who really DO NOT provide any actual service other than bringing buyer’s and seller’s info to agents who feel the need to PAY to get business) will DRIVE UP agent’s costs and are helping prevent any savings to consumers. Agents will want to charge more, not less, to cover these additional costs. Did you know that most of these companies you see advertising connecting you with a “qualified agent” only “qualify” them by finding out if they have enough money to pay for the leads? Yet they imply that they have screened them for the consumers. If these agents are so good, why do they have to pay for leads and are willing to cut their commission? Because they don’t know what the heck they are doing.

Like I said, people don’t know what they don’t know.

By the way, Zillow couldn’t find my old house (even though it had a beautiful aerial shot of my street and the house itself) and ABC put the price at $243,000.

It just sold for $275,500 on 3/9.

Hmmmm….so much for saving the commission. An uneducated, unrepresented seller would have LOST $32,000 trying to “save” money.

With a 6% commission and selling for $275k, the seller would have MADE $14,000 by using a professional.

To hash,

Caution - shameless promotion — have you checked out our site — http://www.movoto.com? We’re on the path to creating the combination of search and home valuation, but we’re just in the California Bay Area for now.

Yea, I’m a little disappointed with the actual performance of both Zillow and Real Estate ABC. In my area (Pittsburgh, PA), I’m getting a lot of numbers that are very low. One house looks to be one of the nicer in it’s area, has a garage, central air, as well as a pool and deck added and kitchen renovated in the last several years. Both services still price the home at under $100k (even when the last selling price was $123k before the improvements). Clearly, there is a lot of information not being used in these calculations.

Buyers and Sellers:

Before you get so hung up on value, value, value, don’t forget market trends and local area risks. Is $300K a good deal if you have comps around $300K? Probably not if the market is going down and not if there is foreclosure activity in the area.
http://www.homesmartreports.com has that information in addition to value estimates. You pay a little for it, but it is important for you to know.

The Zillow and Real Estate ABC websites mentioned above likely use Automated Valuation Modeling (AVM) or some statistical/mathematical methodology to generate their values and they are very new to the game. Most companies in this business have spent a decade or more refining their models in the mortgage industry. One of the critical features of AVM is that it objectively analyzes the data and finds properties most comparable to the subject property being valued, prior to using them in the value estimate. If the models allow you to manipulate the results (adding your subjective input), their purpose is defeated because all objectivity is lost. You have changed the result to suit yourself.

There are three important components to understanding value; the valuation itself, market trends and local area risks. You should understand all of them. If you don’t, it could cost you thousands or tens of thousands. Check out http://www.homesmartreports.com.

I sold a house in the last 2 months and bought a new one in the last week. Here is what I found:

On the one I sold:
Zillow estimated 1.5% less than the sale price. Keep in mind that the old house had a basement finished recently that was not included in the estimate. RealEstateABC could not provide an estimate

On the one I bought:
Zillow was right on the sale price
RealEstateABC estimated higher than what I paid, by 10% - which was actually the 1% higher than the originally listed price

And, I never came across neither of these sites when I was negotiating on either of the houses. I used these sites after the fact.

I think Zillow is right on the money - atleast in the Chicago suburbs.

Thanks

I’m a tester at Zillow.com. Kristin, you seem to understand the industry and represent yourself well. You should not preceive Zillow as a threat to your business… we are hoping to provide more or less a tool.

If we’re doing things right, and we realize we still have our work cut out for us, Zillow is a tool that Sellers, Buyers, Owners, and other real estate professionals can use and each will find some value in the product. For the Sellers and Buyers, there is the obvious valuation aspect of the site. For agents, we offer this as a way to improve the number of transactions a year that you can have. If you increase your transactions, you can lower your commission and seperate yourself from your competition. We hope you will direct your clients to Zillow to familiarize themselves with an area and to begin to educate themselves on what they are looking for before you invest too much of your time pursuing cold leads.

If on the other hand, you are an agent who has 4-5 transactions a year, you may start to feel a pinch in your wallet, indirectly because of Zillow and other online real estate services, but Zillow isn’t really the root cause; it is the other agents who have figured out that the real estate market is changing and openly embrace the newer tools available to them. Some areas we have data but for others we are still trying to gather it. You can always check how accurate we are in an area by consulting our Data Coverage and Zestimate Accuracy page: http://www.zillow.com/howto/Da.....Accuracy.z .

We aren’t done with Zillow by any stretch of the imagination. Just yesterday for instance, we added a 45 degree “Bird’s Eye” feature to the site which we hope will give people a better sense of a neighborhood than the satellite overhead view was able to provide. Since we launched, we’ve added an additional ~5 million homes to the site. We still consider this a beta product but we hope that people will find our “work in progress” a valuable asset.

Kristin, as a real estate professional, I encourage you to sign up on our site http://www.zillow.com/feedback.....erSignup.z . We are constantly looking for ways to improve our offerings and fully value any constructive criticism you might have. While Zillow might be creating and designing the website, http://www.Zillow.com actually belongs to the Real Estate community.

BTW Kristin and Greg, we only have ~46% of the homes in Wisconsin in our database and I don’t see that we have much data at all on Pittsburgh, PA. Clearly these are not market upon which you could rely on our Zestimate.

For those areas where we do have very accurate data, and provided that county records have all the home data correct, our Zestimates can be surprisingly good. The Denver, CO area for instance has a median error of 4.7% with 78% of the homes sold were within 10% of our calculation. This tells you that if we provide you a Zestimate for that area that seems close then it is probably quite accurate. Of course you will be able to find exceptions, so if that home you bought for $100,000 last week is now worth $700,000 by our Zestimate, then you might want to consider that this is one of those times we got it wrong.

The Zillow Zestimate is a starting point. If only to say if you look on Zillow the Zestimate is X, but what Zillow doesn’t know about this home makes it actually worth Y. You can use the My Zestimator as a worksheet to justify whatever you percieve the actual value to be, and to document how those additions impact the overall value of the property. The owner of a house can use the same feature as a what-if worksheet to see what a kitchen remodel would do for the value of the home they are considering selling.

Zillow worked the first time I tried to locate any home.
ABC is 0 for 2 tries.
Why keep trying - just use Zillow.com

I used zillow as a starting point to give me an idea of what I kind of offer I should make on a home we are purchasing in the south puget sound area of WA state….The home was originally listed at 290k….zillow zestimated at 259,995….I offered 260k….we setteled at 265k….the house was just appraised at 285k…

Whats the point of Zillow and ABC when many agents out there estimate house prices for free? Agents are not middlemen, they are like lawyers. The only middlemen are search engines like google, trulia or the new extate.com that connect buyers with agents. These are the services that will survive.

Interestingly, Zillow could not provide me any information about my house in Endicott, NY except the town partial assessment numbers for the neighborhood. ABC was able to provide that information plus the comps of houses that had sold around mine for the last several years. A lot more information to work with and it was all available to Zillow but they couldn’t seem to find it.

Bill

Zillow doesn’t work with the Apple operating system’s integrated Safari web browser.

An opening page instructs Mac users to download software for another browser to view the site. Who in their right mind would download 3rd party software for an inferior browser just to view one website?

This lack of technical savvy leads me to question the accuracy and integrity of Zillow’s content, especially when similar information is available on ABC and other Mac compatible websites. Even my local newspaper’s website provides real estate closing prices by address for the past 6 years.

Hi there,

This is Bryan from Zillow and as a mac user I understand the frustration that we don’t currently support Safari. Every effort is being made to add support in the near future.

The current version of Safari is missing some key functionality which the Zillow.com application relies upon. For more details on the subject please reference: http://www.zillowblog.com/zill.....pport.html