Thursday, February 09, 2006

new ways to check on the value of your real estate in the us

feb 8th
 
this gives one a comforting feeling -- perhaps the one that comes just before the bubble bursts :-(
 
prices have dropped a bit but it's still not a panic.
 
We would have been online a bit longer this morning if Ellison hadn't been hitting our servers so hard: The much discussed real estate bubble may have moved online. This morning former Expedia Chief Executive Rich Barton launched Zillow.com, a service that provides real-time estimates of of home valuations. Give Zillow the address of your home and it will provide you with an estimate of its valuation, the date and purchase price of the last sale, and data on comparable home. "The data is as good as we can get it, given the way we are collecting it and the amount we are sharing," Barton told the Seattle Post Intelligencer. "We are going to put it out there because it is too much fun to hold back, but we know full well that we are not like Moses taking the tablets from the Lord and handing them down." It's a neat little service -- when it's up and running (Zillow has been down all morning), and one that could be another step in the disintermediation of the local real estate agent. After all, a service like Zillow gives aspiring sellers one less reason to look to agents for guidance. Of course, it doesn't yet offer sale listings themselves, but it's certain to soon. Zillow's bread and butter is targeted advertising, and what better target could there be for real estate agents peddling homes.
 

No comments: