There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Zillow.com (page 10 of 13)

Travel through time as you learn to take your Zestimate with 1.027631 grains of salt . . .

The Sunday New York Times will have a feature on hi-tech real estate, but you can see it today through the miracle of Google.

Not hugely interesting, more a catalog of press releases. Kristal Kraft gets a chance to strut, which is fun.

And: Zillow.com says you have to take their Zestimates with a grain of salt, which must be why none of them ends with three zeros.

The gist of the article is that information is more valuable to home buyers than pumpkins (who knew?), but, taking account of that, there is a huge omission: ShackPrices.com, the leader of the pack in deep info. Zillow should just buy them so they can get the kind of press attention they deserve…

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Lucky or Consistent(ly Bad)?

And if Redfin’s trip to SoCal wasn’t enough of a distraction today, Zillow issued their Quarterly Home Value reports for 2006. Alas, so much “material” and so little time.

You can see their “Zindex’s” for 75 metro area both on their website and at their blog. I begin by stating the obvious; their median “home values” are based on their own Zestimates, which agents largely agree are (sometimes significantly) flawed. Like a bad wreck, I had to look however.

Surprisingly, Zillow’s quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year numbers for San Diego and its various neighborhoods are not far off compared to recorded sale price changes. I guess when you are talking averages, you can be consistently bad or consistently good, so long as you are consistent.

Edited to add a thank you to Amanda Hoffman at Zillow for sending me the links to the info this morning. They have put together a staggering amount of statistical data which I admittedly haven’t had time to give more than a cursory glance yet.

Fortune on Zillow.com: They can gape, but they can’t Google . . .

It’s possible that I’ve written more about Zillow.com than any other real estate weblogger. More on why Automated Valuation Methods necessarily stink. More on why the National Community Reinvestment Coalition’s shake-down of Zillow.com stinks even worse. More on Zillow.com’s new features.

If I haven’t written more than anyone else, I’ve certainly written plenty. Want proof?

If you Google on Zillow.com, you have to drill all the way down to the third and fourth entries to find my posts. Most days, I beat their own frolickin’ weblog.

But let’s be conservative and simply say that, as a weblogging Realtor based in Phoenix, AZ, I’ve written quite a bit about Zillow.com. So when Fortune magazine writes a cover story about Zillow.com, who don’t they talk to?

They quoted a real estate weblogger — one I’ve never seen before — whose site has been dormant since last October.

And they talked to a Phoenix-based Realtor, Brett Barry, A Realty Executives agent working out of Scottsdale. (Brett emailed me about this article when he was interviewed a while ago.)

But apparently Fortune Senior Editor Jeffrey M. O’Brien didn’t run a simple Google search.

What he did do — almost but not quite — is talk a sweet pregnant lady into turning on her buyer’s agent and disintermediating the bee-hotch. I told David Gibbons last week that the Make Me Move feature puts Zillow.com in the business of brokerage, even thought they’re not taking commissions for it. I wrote about this in December, but, even so, he was taken aback. But in the article, O’Brien is actively marketing his home as a Make Me Move FSBO transaction.

It’s a fun article, but there’s really nothing new in it. It’s impressive, I suppose, that Zillow.com can make the cover of Fortune without even a hint of profitability on its horizons. And it’s certainly a matter of interest to me that I could wrestle my way to third and fourth position on the search for Zillow.com — a search for which BloodhoundBlog gets over a hundred unique hits a day — but not attract the attention of Fortune magazine. Who says real estate is going hi-tech…?

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Feed the starving Realty.bot: Zillow.com is underwhelming, so far, as a National Property Listings Service . . .

I think I have to back off — for now, at least — from my earlier expectations for Zillow.com as an incipient National Property Listings Service. To this date, anyway, Zillow’s appeal to sellers and listing agents has been underwhelming, at best. As I write, there are 19,250 homes listed for sale on the system. An additional 10,381 are listed under the “Make Me Move” option. By contrast, at the time that Zillow.com released these changes to its software, Trulia.com announced that it had achieved one million on-line listings.

At that time, I had written Trulia and other on-line listings aggregators off as dinosaurs, and I still believe this is true. But if Zillow.com represents the coming of the mammals, the first mammalian species to have evolved must have been the sloth.

What’s the problem?

No XML feed.

When these software upgrades were made, Galen Ward speculated that Zillow had skipped the feed to capture agents’ eyeballs for its advertising. If this is the actual reason Zillow elected not to permit listing by XML feed — as is done by the other Realty.bot listings aggregators — then the strategy has backfired.

Whatever Zillow’s reason not to have a feed, that reason is wrong. In making these changes, Zillow.com voluntarily surrendered the fearsome mojo of it’s Delphic Automated Valuation Method. Overnight, it transformed itself from every Realtor’s favorite bette noir to… just another listings bot. And as exciting as it might be as a listings bot, it’s but one more of what are already too many listings bots — and the only one of the bunch that can’t be fed from PostLets or vFlyer or one of many proprietary Realtor web site vendors.

That is: It went from being potentially threatening to Realtors but fundamentally useless to potentially useful but fundamentally a pain in the ass to Realtors.

This turns out not to have been an improvement, especially as Zillow.com prepares to roll out an advertising product targeted to Realtors. Zillow.com has always been able to deliver potential sellers — even as it delivers wildly inaccurate Zestimates to them. But without a significant number of homes listed for sale, Read more

Hey, buddy . . . Wanna buy a Zip Code . . . ?

Eppraisal.com and Zillow.com today both announced Zip Code based advertising programs to allow agents to display ads to people searching in their particular farm areas.

Under the Eppraisal.com plan, agents will sponsor particular Zip Codes for a fee of $20 a month.

If you are a real estate professional, you can sponsor any zip code in America and begin connecting with the eppraisal.com users who are eager to understand how much their castle is worth. You’ll be exposed to consumers who are ready to take action on buying, selling or re-financing a home. By sponsoring a zip code, or multiple zip codes, you gain exclusive access to users within the area as well as premium advertising opportunities to those targeted zones for only $20 per month.

Zillow’s plans are not as definite at this point:

Today at Real Estate Connect NY, Zillow president Lloyd Frink talked about a new advertising product coming during the first quarter of this year, one that allows agents and other real individual estate professionals to buy inexpensive, targeted advertising on the site.

We’re calling it EZAds — and it’s pretty simple — an easy, online way for individual agents and other real estate professionals to buy and customize ads on Zillow.com, targeted to specific searched ZIP codes. The ads show up on ZIP code-specific areas throughout the site, including map pages and home detail pages.

No word on pricing, nor availability.

Curiously, neither site elected to follow the Realtor.com business model of selling outrageously large farming areas to multiple, competing agents…

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Thank You, Mr. Barton, May I Have Another?

Richard_Barton_newRich Barton asking: “Why do some people take an instant dislike to me?”

My answer: “To save time”.

I’ll give Rich Barton and Zillow full credit for listening to the PR firm they must have hired. Just last February this is what Rich was saying:

Zillow’s Barton was quoted as saying that inevitably real estate services and fees will change as online services take hold. “I’m not implying that we have some new commission model figured out, but it feels like . . . Realtor services are going to be unbundled a bit,” he told Inman Real Estate News.

Nice, huh? Right out of the gate and the most important thing he has to say to the press is how HE is going to help drive down real estate commissions. Here is more from our new best friend, Rich Barton:

“People want Realtors,” he said. “But is it rational to pay Realtors what they are paid?” He says he thinks they are overpaid because customers are doing more of the work themselves.

Zillow, for instance, has a number of other features that do the work of the agent. Someone wanting to compare properties can use pull-down menus to estimate the value of remodeling projects that are not reflected in the price. Because of the Internet, agents are spending less time with clients, Mr. Barton said. “Agents have to ask, What kind of value am I adding?”

Mr. Barton does not exclude the possibility that the role of the agent, and his site, may change.

Good News Everyone! Rich added: “it is not our intent to dislocate the agent.” free stupid

He wants us all to earn less but he is willing to let us keep our jobs. This is good news – especially in light of the way he is now (just 10 months later) being heralded as being on the verge of changing real estate for the better. It wouldn’t seem quite so wild except it is Realtors doing the horn blowing for him. What must have occurred in that boardroom in Seattle?

“Listen Rich, if we are ever going to take over the industry you are going to Read more

Zillow.com versus Realtor.com: Nothing grows in the shade of great tree . . .

I think part of the problem, in understanding the radical nature of what Zillow.com did this week, is that we are conflating unlike things. As an example, when I speak of a National MLS, I am not talking about local MLS systems.

For one thing, the sine qua non purpose of a local MLS system is to advertise the co-broke commission to other agents, keeping it secret from consumers. This objective is not even on the radar of home searchers, whether they are looking at local IDX listings or a national site like Realtor.com.

Kevin Boer posted an excellent analysis of why Zillow will not replace local MLS systems. I agree, for now, but that’s not really the issue. In the second place, if we were to split the buyer’s agent’s commission from the listing agent’s commission, the entire rationale for exclusive local MLS systems goes away.

But in the first place, home searchers are not going to any listings systems to find out about commissions. To the extent that a local MLS system corresponds to a market as Kevin sees it, to that extent a national home listings service is an entirely different type of market. If the one facilitates the essential activities of real estate brokerage, the other exists to introduce home searchers to the real estate market, to particular real estate products and to real estate vendors.

They are not the same market, so conflating the two is an error. If you want, we can call the idea of a National MLS system something else: National Property Listings Service — NeoPoLiS, “new town” in Greek.

The point is that harping that Zillow can’t do this and Zillow can’t do that is completely true and completely pointless: Zillow isn’t doing those things, nor could it, nor should it. What Zillow might be doing, and only time will tell if it can pull it off, is creating a national clearinghouse for listed homes — which will be brokered by off-site — and normally local — means.

In comments to one of my posts, Dustin Luther raises some plausible objections to my arguments. His counter is that Read more

In the trenches with Zillow.com: A working Realtor’s first-hand experience listing a home . . .

Zillow has had Greg’s attention for a long time, going back to an Odysseus post from last February, when we were blogging for our own entertainment. Greg has debunked Zillow, he’s defended Zillow, but till this week I’ve been indifferent. Zillow has held as much relevance for me as Ragnarok Online. Both have inspired a lot of buzz among their audiences, but neither made my life better, easier, happier, so I’ve not wasted time on them.

But this past Monday, when David Gibbons told us about Zillow’s plans to add the For Sale and Make Me Move tools to their comprehensive database, he gave me a reason to care. When someone hires me to sell her house, one of my jobs is to let as many prospective buyers as possible know that this house is for sale. Zillow will help me find an audience that I might not already be getting through buyers’ brokers, drive-bys, Realtor.com, open houses… So now Zillow has made my life better, easier, happier, by giving me a tool to bring my client’s house to more potential buyers.

To get to know this new tool, I claimed our own house on My Zillow. Here I got to experience first hand the problem with using Zillow for an accurate estimation of a house’s value. We live on a wonderfully eclectic street of ranch, bi-level and split-level 1960’s houses in the North Central Phoenix subdivision, Terry Terrace. Lots are all around 8000 square feet, but the houses range between 1400 to 2850 square feet. At 1993 square feet, ours is about average. The people who remodeled the house before we bought it did some wonderful things — enclosing the carport to make a 2-car garage and landscaping were minor compared to the the major improvement of raising the ceiling and removing the labyrinth of walls common in 1962, to open up the living area side of the house into two huge, very livable and very workable rooms. Then they added requisite granite, 18″ tile, designer cabinets and upgraded appliances. And, since we’ve moved in we’ve upgraded the bathrooms and all the Read more

You were saying . . . ?

Chickens? Eggs? How about poached eggs on toast…?

BloodhoundBlog’s team coverage of the Zillow.com upgrades:

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Louis Vuitton and the French Revolution

Louis Vuitton and the French Revolution. That is what my daughter told me she would be learning about in her high school European History class. Right war, wrong Louis.

On the morning after the Zillow news, I had my own knee-jerk reaction. I subsequently took it upon myself to contact a preeminent real estate reporter for my local rag, the San Diego Union Tribune. I referred him to the many on-line discussions that were taking place, and suggested there might be a story here. Also, in an enlightened moment of shameless self-promotion, I suggested that on his next slow news day, he might investigate the real estate blogging phenomenon and perhaps even the surprising dearth of serious San Diego-based blogs. (Jeff, yours is an exception, of course).

Regarding the Zillow debate, and I will paraphrase, he indicated that they would not be pursuing the story at this time. Message being, no news here. Funny, I thought, as yesterday morning’s business section included the following headlines: Aeromexico begins nonstop flights from S.D. to Mexico City; Food is family’s matter (Chick-fil-A founder’s grandson opens a new local restaurant); and Yahoo! reshuffles top management. Okay, I’ll give them that last one. But, Zillow isn’t news? It took me an embarrassingly long time (one coffee refill) to grasp the underlying reason for his reluctance to acknowledge and address my issue.

The Sunday Homes section is gasping for breath. Newer, less experienced agents can’t afford it, and the more experienced, knowledgeable agents have all but value-engineered it out of the marketing equation. Print media no longer provides the results, the return on investment, that can justify this as a significant marketing dollar investment. In-line classified ads have become a component of our advertising arsenal only as they serve to placate our home selling clients, utilized almost entirely to “buy” our listings. The newspapers have their on-line counterparts, of course, in an attempt to compete in the IT revolution, but an announcement such as the one by Zillow yesterday serves as a painful reminder that they can’t.

I expect and hope that there will always be a place for the printed Read more

Zillow redux: A post-diluvian retrospective . . .

Drew Meyers is doing an excellent job of cataloging the Zillow coverage. My plan is to ponder issues arising in posts and comments, here and everywhere. No guarantee that I’m not missing something, so it would be a great favor if you would point out my lapses.

Zillow understands PR. They’ve had company bigfeet out doing media drop-ins for a while, and, for the weblogging community, David Gibbons separately briefed Ardell DellaLoggia, Cathleen and me, and a third weblogger in San Francisco, identity undisclosed. The point of all this was to spread advance news of the upgrade, but to have it embargoed until 10 PM last night. I’m sure the resulting blog-frenzy suited them just fine, but, even knowing what was going to happen once news broke, there was no way I was going to miss this show.

But: This is why I wanted to go at the thing in the greatest depth I could achieve, right from the beginning. The fact of the matter is, the center of gravity in the real estate world shifted last night — away from Chicago and toward Seattle. It was only a partial shift, and it might turn out to be only temporary, but the professional porcupine that is the National Association of Realtors lost a double-hand-full of quills last night. If it continues to lose more than it manages to grow back, soon enough it will be nothing more than a naked rat. Then what?

The person I was most interested in hearing from last night was Galen Ward, and I said so right away at Rain City Guide. He didn’t disappoint, delivering a trenchant analysis without the advance notice Ardell and I had:

Zillow has the best shot at getting the chicken or the egg (you need one to get the other). Most non-MLS sites (Trulia, Propsmart, ForSaleByOwner, etc.) have had the nasty problem of beginning with no listings and no searchers (no chickens or eggs). Each has tried a novel and somewhat successful way of getting searchers or listings – crawling sites for listings, offering free listings, pay-per click ads to lure searchers, etc. None Read more

Early morning Zillow news round-up . . .

I have a walk-through this morning, so this is just a list of what I’ve seen out there this morning. I’m sure there’s stuff I’m missing, and the real news will come when people have had time to play with the new feature set. No particular order, no presumption of agreement or endorsement, just wall-to-wall coverage.

Drew Meyers’ list of links has been expanded.

Ardell has a list of her own going.

Much more: ZillowBlog, LA Times, Ardell’s other weblog, MSNBC, Seasttle Post-Intelligencer, HotPads, SocketSite, TransparentRE, Ubertor, Three Oceans Real Estate early and later, Sellsius, Galen Ward at RCG (cited last night, also), Real Central VA, Matrix, 360 Digest, BlueRoof.com.

BloodhoundBlog’s team coverage of the Zillow.com upgrades:

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Is Bloodhoundblog The Most Wired In Blog In Real Estate?

I got back to my desk late this evening. I had an Inman News Flash email with a time stamp of 10:21 PM announcing the new features on Zillow. Naturally I thought I would pass it along to the Phoenix resident expert on all things Zillow – Greg Swann. The last two times I tried “helping Greg” by passing something along to him I was surprised to find that he already knew about it. This time I thought it might be different as it was about 11 PM and I knew he didn’t have a paid subscription to Inman News. But just to be sure, I went to Bloodhoundblog to catch up first. As you will see below – if you haven’t already, Greg not only knew all about it – he had known all about it for days, and had been interviewed by the folks at Zillow so they could find out what he had to say about it!

Damn! What an amazing group has been assembled here. Good thing none of us suffers from stage fright, as I suspect the spot lights aimed here will only get brighter. On that note, I need to admit several errors on my part. I don’t have all of the correct facts yet, but I received a call last night from my good friend, Marge Lindsay – Bob Wolff had called her. Most of today Bob and I played phone tag and I have not spoken to him yet. Bob is the top selling Re/Max agent whose name I mentioned in my post about Steve Ozonian’s home sale. I believe the specific statements I made which are not true are: his house was not located in Laguna Niguel, there was no dispute regarding commissions – in fact Bob Wolff HAD the listing but later canceled it, and it was not a Coldwell Banker agent who later sold the house. I was also told that Steve Ozonian had sent me an email to let me know about this but I did not receive one from him. I did reply via email to a comment from Read more

2006 is the Year of Zillow: The 900 pound AVM has been upgraded to be a free listing platform and the presumptive national MLS system . . .

The News

An upgrade made tonight to Zillow.com‘s on-line home evaluation system 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 of any Zestimable homes 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.

From the company’s press release:

Leading real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced a major upgrade, allowing homeowners and real estate agents to post homes for sale for free. Additionally, in redefining what it means for a house to be “For Sale,” Zillow? is enabling any homeowner to post a Make Me Move? price.

“To date Zillow has created a Web page for almost every home in the country – close to 70 million – on which we’ve placed public records data and our Zestimate? home valuations,” said Rich Barton, Zillow’s co-founder and CEO. “With today’s new release we are opening up every home’s Web page on Zillow.com for owners and their real estate agents to plant virtual ‘For Sale’ signs in their Zillow front yards for free.”

In addition, any homeowner can now post a Make Me Move price. “What number would it take for you to call the movers and hand over your keys?” asked Lloyd Frink, Zillow’s co-founder and president. “Make Me Move is our twist on the traditional ‘For Sale’ sign.” A homeowner can easily post a Make Me Move price without exposing any personal information. Zillow then enables interested buyers to contact the owner through an email “anonymizer.” There is no charge for the service.

All postings, be they “For Sale” or Make Me Move, provide free uploading of pictures, home descriptions including “what I love about my home,” and neighborhood commentary. Additionally, real estate agents who post homes they are representing for sale can publish their own contact information, link to listings on their own Web sites, and upload a photo Read more

Use full appraisal to correctly assess house’s true value

This is me from today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

Use full appraisal to correctly assess house’s true value

Who can best judge what a piece of real property will sell for?

We all know the answer to that. The best estimate of the value of real estate will come from an experienced real estate appraiser.

After that, a Broker’s Price Opinion will come second. In certain very homogenous neighborhoods, a Price Opinion may be just as accurate as a full appraisal.

Third place belongs to an experienced agent’s Comparative Market Analysis. This can be very accurate in homogenous neighborhoods, substantially less so where homes or lots differ significantly.

Last place goes to the results produced by an Automated Valuation Method, such as Zillow.com or Eppraisal.com. An AVM does not evaluate houses, but rather provides statistics and records about houses. It cannot, for an extreme example, tell you whether the house is still there at the time of the evaluation.

It is fairly common to hear people say that AVMs will get more accurate in time. In fact, there is a finite limit to how much they can be improved.

A CMA is essentially an all-paper calculation. But a CMA is produced by an agent who has a great deal of on-the-ground experience, most of which will never be encoded into an AVM’s software. Amenities such as landscaping, decor, orientation or views cannot be accounted for by an AVM.

But the other end of this question is need vs. costs. If you want to know what your supervisor’s house is worth, use Zillow.com. It costs nothing, and close enough is good enough.

If you need to know what to offer on a house you want to buy, you need a CMA at the least. The good news is, your agent will probably provide it free.

The same is probably true for a Broker’s Price Opinion, which you will want if you are planning to sell a home.

But if you need to know the value of a piece of real property to a very high degree of accuracy — for instance, to qualify for a mortgage — you’re going to pay $300 or Read more