Category: Zillow.com (page 6 of 13)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Not so much, despite a prank posting on the realty.bot’s forums:

Zillow will be shut down on Nov 2nd

Their revenue stream is in concert with the real estate market. They simply ran out of money.

Hence no price updates for over a month.

The Cluetrain runs on Saturdays in Seattle, so David Gibbons rushed in to quash the rumor (once I had asked for a comment, I should add):

OK, OK – Zillow is not shutting down.

Quite the contrary. I’m sorry that Zestimate updates are delayed – there’s a sticky post in the Zillow forum that explains this further. The short story is that we’re preparing for a massive update to Zestimates and data – and have had to freeze site data while that project is ongoing. I understand that it’s frustrating and ask for your patience for a little while longer.

Financially, the company is very healthy – but thanks for your concern. Yep, Homer; we did just raise a 3rd round of venture Capital – $30M – for a total of $89M to date. Ad sales at Zillow are better than expected – please remember to support our advertisers!

New data will be on the site shortly – and much more cool stuff will launch over the next 3 months. We’re not going anywhere.

The rumor was obvious bunk, but it’s cool that it shook some news loose from the Zillowtree.

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From Houston RealNews:

The Houston Association of Realtors (HAR) may be a whisker away from providing listings data to real estate valuation site Zillow.com.

HAR Chairman Rob Cook released a statement today:

“Zillow receives four million visitors per month so we would certainly like to have our listings on the site…”

HAR already provides its listings to Realtor.com, Google [as noted in this HRN report], Homes.com and more.

So releasing them to Zillow would not be entirely unique.

If RE/Max and Keller Williams make deals with Zillow, they will have half of the MLS, nationwide, in two strokes of the pen. We are as excited as we are about the advent of FBS Systems’ flexmls system in Phoenix because Realtors on the ground need to deliver a convincing value proposition about searching for homes on our sites, rather than on national listing.bots.

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, technology, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

VentureBeat:

Zillow, the controversial website that gives value estimates of people’s homes and other real estate info, has raised a significant $30 million of funding, despite the mortgage industry credit crunch.

The Seattle company has now raised a hefty $87 million in total funding during its short lifetime, making it one of the most richly backed of the new era of “Web 2.0″ Internet companies.

The round was led by Legg Mason Capital Management. Previous backers Benchmark Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures and PAR Capital all participated.

Opened in early 2005 by the founders of Expedia, Zillow started out as a portal for information about homes around the country. Over time, it has added on sales components for owners and real estate agents, and also provides a place for buyers to discuss or ask questions about a property.

Only last month, we reported that competitor site Redfin had landed $12 million in funding, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Trulia, the other main player in the Web 2.0 real estate space, pulled in $10 million in May. Terabitz, started by a teenager, raised $10 million in July (our coverage).

Asked whether this most recent funding round has anything to do with the real estate slowdown, chief financial officer Spencer Rascoff told me that there was no relation. Rather, it had to do with the company’s focus on employing plenty of skilled developers and improving the site.

The country’s real estate troubles may indirectly benefit the Zillow, though; real estate agents desperate to sell homes are far more likely to post their offerings online, sacrificing some control in exchange for having more people see their properties.

Nota bene: Revised to reflect changes in VentureBeat’s story.

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Zillow.com is getting ready to get ready to take listings data feeds. The X in XML stands for eXtensible, but Zillow and dynamism sleep at opposite ends of the bed. In any case, if you ready to get started getting ready to go, Zillow is prepared to think about undertaking those last few items of preparation. If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail, but what happens if you fail to plan (to plan (to plan (to plan (…))))? It’s a problem. As the Melancholy Dane advises, “Get thee to a vomitoria!” When it comes to lunch and data feeds, “a double blessing is a double grace,” so to speak.

I haven’t looked at the specs yet, but I have PHP for feeds into Trulia, PropSmart and ZeeMaps. If your broker won’t support you, it may be I can help.

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m quoting from David Gibbons from Zillow.com. He wrote these remarks in a comment, but I’m pulling them out because it’s an interesting topic: How can web-based vendors build databases of neighborhood expertise?

What you are seeing in the neighborhood space is the lack of any predefined neighborhood database. It’s never been done before and so, while there’s a great place to start when building a taxonomy of regions at any other level, neighborhoods are tough to build.

The 6,500 neighborhoods currently defined on Zillow were done by hand. We’ve talked this through with outside.in – they took the same approach. The solution is to allow homeowners to collaboratively describe their neighborhoods and we’ll iterate towards that but even homeowners seldom agree on neighborhood designations and boundaries. It’s an interesting problem to solve.

That’s what I said. This is me when Zillow 6 was released:

What does all this have to do with Zillow.com?

I think they’ve made a mistake in their approach to community building, a mistake that will prevent a true community from emerging from all their efforts.

As an example, what is a neighborhood? It’s not what Zillow says it is, and it’s not what some city council says it is. A neighborhood is what the neighbors say it is, and, as in my North Central Phoenix neighborhood, neighbors can differ about what the neighborhood really is.

So how should Zillow define the neighborhoods it hopes end-users will create content around?

It shouldn’t. It should let the users define the neighborhoods, and if there are different interpretations of what the neighborhood is, it should allow the proponents of those different ideas to create multiple competing neighborhood descriptions. When one starts to draw all the attention and the other fades away, Zillow can snuff the loser. Until then, the neighborhood advocates will have an investment in creating content for Zillow, and an avid interest in getting their friends to the site to show off what they have created.

In other words, they will have created a virtual analogue of their neighborhood as a means of defining and describing it. This is an atom-sized on-line community, an acorn from Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We live and work right on the Arizona Canal in North Central Phoenix. North Central is a nebulous geographical region. Properly speaking, it runs from Seventh Street to Seventh Avenue, Missouri Street to the Canal. Within those boundaries, you will find some of the most prosperous and powerful people in the city — two categories from which we are more than amply excluded.

People living as far east as 16th Street and as far west as 19th Avenue might claim to live in North Central, and it would be considered churlish to contradict them. But this courtesy would not be extended to anyone living north of the Arizona Canal. North of the Canal is Sunnyslope, one of the worst neighborhoods in Phoenix.

What’s the difference? About $150,000 right now. In other words, the house you could buy just north of the Canal for $250,000 would cost you at least $400,000 if you were to buy it just south of the Canal. Location, location, location.

Now suppose you have joyfully paid that price premium to own, use, enjoy and profit from a home in North Central. If you went to your neighborhood page on Zillow.com, what might you not want to see?

I added the highlighting, just to put a finer point on the slur. In fact, this is just the kind of ham-handed stupidity you would expect from a robo-bartender, which, if you think about it, is one of the bogus roles a social network can take on.

Full disclosure: I am a social networking skeptic. The youthful fetish clubs are immensely popular with people who are determined to stay forever young. The commerce-oriented sites are full of self-promoters, every bit as interesting as the Friday morning business card exchange at the Denny’s over by the freeway. It could be there is something else I’m missing, but I’m not predisposed to care.

The truth is, I’m an introvert, as are many smart, technically-oriented people. My skin doesn’t actually crawl when I’m around other people, but my social interactions are always project-focused, and I’ve never been to a party that I didn’t want to leave before I got Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From John Cook’s Venture Blog:

As an investor and board member at Avvo, I asked [Zillow.com’s Rich Barton] when Zillow might roll out an online rating system for real estate agents. That idea is in the works, with Barton saying that the company also is trying to develop ways for consumers to search for agents based on specific criteria. Stay tuned…

First we’ll milk ’em for free content as the only persistent members of our “community.” Then we’ll sell ’em astoundingly low-yield advertising. Then we’ll get anonymous misanthropes to write poison-pen letters about them. That sounds like a plan…

Am I missing something, or is this evidence of an unbounded cluelessness?

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

With its Z6 software release, which goes live tonight, Zillow.com adds a neighborhood level of user conversations, similar to Trulia.com’s Trulia Voices feature released in May of this year.

From Zillow’s press release:

Real estate Web site Zillow.com today added a number of new community features, opening up the site even further to user contributions. Chief among these additions are individual neighborhood pages in more than 130 U.S. cities (more than 6,500 neighborhoods in all). The pages are seeded with rich local demographic and real estate information, but are built for communities and neighbors to make their own. Anyone within a community has the ability to add photos, events, local news, engage in discussions and ask or answer questions about neighborhood real estate.

“Adding the ability for neighbors to meet, share information and learn about their local neighborhood is a natural next step for Zillow. We started with individual Web pages and Home Q&A for more than 70 million homes, and today we’re bringing the conversation out to the neighborhood level,” said Lloyd Frink, Zillow president. “In the offline world, conversations happen all the time around homes, neighborhoods and communities. With these additions, we’re adding the data, tools and a platform for these conversations to thrive online — and help people become smarter about real estate, for free, in the process.”

Neighborhoods are accessed from any of the 70 million Home Details pages within Zillow, or via the “local real estate” link at the bottom of every Zillow page.

There’s more, but we’ll come back to it.

First: Is this a surprise to anyone? The new features were accidentally pre-announced last week in an inadvertently transmitted email. I understood the portent of that email, as I’m sure did everyone else in the RE.net who got it: Responding to Trulia was Zillow’s obvious next move, and they’re fairly steady at doing major upgrades once a quarter. The only real surprise was that the hermetically-sealed start-up actually leaked something.

But could it be that Zillow and Trulia are stuck in a tennis volley of answering each other’s features? Truila Voices was the loud claim from the Read more