Dec. 15, 2006: Real estate web sites offer exciting options

Depending on whom you talk to, the real estate industry is undergoing a revolutionary change - or is not.

The "Realty.bots" arrived in force in 2006, national Web sites offering free home evaluations or free for-sale listings for homeowners.

Some Realtors and consumers view these as harbingers of great change. Others yawn and dismiss them as gimmicks.

Zillow.com, one of the biggest of the Realty.bots, just upped the stakes with an upgrade that will add the following new functionality:
  • Owners or listing agents for any of the 67 million homes in Zillow's database will be able to list those homes for sale at no cost.
  • Owners will be able to post a "Make Me Move" price on their homes, the price at which all objections to selling will have been overcome.
  • Zillow is creating a real estate "wiki" to serve as a sort of Wikipedia.org-like encyclopedia of real estate.
The wiki -- a user-built and maintained encyclopedia -- is a nice idea that may grow into something great in time.

The Make Me Move feature seems like a gimmick right now, although it may turn into a vibrant clearinghouse for homes.

But the big news is that owners and Realtors will be able to list their homes on a site that already draws around 3.2 million visitors a month.

On the one hand, that number is huge. It rivals Realtor.com, the 900-pound gorilla of real estate Web sites.

On the other hand, it could be a big yawn: Millions upon millions of homeowners and buyers are not going to Zillow.com or to any real estate sites.

Surely this will change over the long run, and Zillow is positioning itself to be the one-stop-shopping national real estate Web site. This bodes ill for Realtor.com and all of the other Realty.bots.

Real estate is local, not national, and a real estate transaction involves hundreds of intricate details for which expert advice is essential.

So what does all this mean for consumers and Realtors? Time will tell -- but these are exciting times in the real estate market.

Greg Swann is the designated broker for BloodhoundRealty.com, a full-service Metropolitan Phoenix real estate brokerage. This article originally appeared in the West Valley regional sections of the Arizona Republic.

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