by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The attempted shakedown of Zillow.com that began last October — when The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaining that the nascent Seattle-based Automated Valuation Model (AVM) was misleading minority homeowners about the value of their homes — has come to stunningly banal conclusion.

In a letter dated May 4, 2007, the FTC elects to take “no further Commission action,” citing Zillow.com’s fortified disclaimers about the accuracy of AVM results and the need for site visitors to investiagte other sources of real estate evaluation.

The NCRC has since discovered the sub-prime mortgage melt-down as a more profitable mine to be quarried, since lenders can be faulted simultaneously for the foolish loans they made to minority borrowers in the past and for forbearing to be equally foolish in the present.

You can read the FTC’s letter here.

I wrote a great deal about this issue last fall, all of which is linked below. As with the State of Arizona’s persecution of Zillow.com, I see the NCRC shake-down as old-school criminality attempting to impose itself on the internet — trying to leverage off of Zillow’s fame or perhaps viewing AVMs as the weakest member of the new-economy herd in PR terms. In any case, this moral victory with the FTC will rob innuendo-wending reporters of a minor weapon to inveigh against the web start-up in stories about the on-going Arizona controversy.

These are my posts about the attempted NCRC shake-down of Zillow.com:

More at John’s Cook’s Venture Blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

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