I have a little prototype of a Zillow.bot. Here is all it does for now:
- It takes as input a download of listings from the ARMLS system
- It isolates the street address, the price, and the listing brokerage, throwing away all the other fields
- It sorts these newly concatenated fields by street name and house number, pumping the results to the screen for printing or post-processing in an Excel spreadsheet
The gross idea is that a human input operator can work street by street in Zillow, which is more convenient and less error-prone than working in price order, which is how the MLS system sorts listings. (Plus which, there is no Excel-sortable ARMLS report that includes the name of the listing brokerage.)
Ahem #1: I can convert the output to an XML file in four minutes, tops.
Ahem #2: If I get bored enough with doing this work manually, I’ll figure out a way to do it in JavaScript.
Actually, the real grief is going to be hot-sheeting every search.bot I build for my little Zillow.bot. If I pee on the tree when the house is listed for sale, I have an obligation to hose it off when it sells. This is a challenge for automation…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Kris Berg says:
That was my initial concern – The hosing off part. Do you really think that there is enough potential reward for your efforts? Not challenging you, I just haven’t reached a strong opinion, myself. (This from the girl who was the last one in the country to give in to single-property URL’s).
April 11, 2007 — 12:27 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Do you really think that there is enough potential reward for your efforts?
I don’t know. The time commitment is small, less than one minute a house, even doing the work manually. If I can figure out a way to automate the process, it gets close to being free. Even so, I’m doing it when I don;t have to be a slave to the phone, so it’s costing me nothing but sleep I wouldn’t get anyway.
In any case, it’s a good a reason for hot-sheeting our farm every day, which I should be doing anyway. I landed on a cancelled listng last night minutes after the cancellation. I have photos of that house from the last two marketing efforts, perfect bait for selling an historic home.
However: I have a much better idea for doing free self-promotion on the new Zillow, one that will require some effort but will make us inescapable in the neighborhoods we farm.
Here’s a way of thinking of this: Zillow 5 is like a major upgrade in a substantial desktop application like PhotoShop (CS3 is due soon!). When there are many new features, and when the new features can interact synergistically, it’s possible to keep discovering new potential for quite a while.
April 11, 2007 — 12:54 pm
Mark Ballard says:
I feel like the car mechanic is telling me how my valves are not synchronizing with my timing chain. I can’t argue with you because your vocabulary and knowledge is so far past my “common blogger” education.
April 11, 2007 — 4:26 pm