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Category: Zillow.com (page 9 of 13)

April 13, 2007

Arizona Board of Appraisal to Zillow.com: In your Zestimation, does this posturing make us look stupid?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Arizona Republic (tipped by Adam Tarr and Sharon Kotula):

An Arizona regulatory board has ordered Zillow.com to stop offering its online estimates of home values.

The Arizona Board of Appraisal has issued two cease and desist letters to the popular real estate Web site, claiming Zillow needs an appraiser license to offer its “zestimates” in Arizona.

“It is the board’s feeling that (Zillow) is providing an appraisal,” said Deborah Pearson, Board of Appraisal executive director.

This would be in contra-distinction to all the other Automated Valuation Methods operating in the state, some of which are actually used by lenders to underwrite home loans.

All last year, I wondered when the appraisers were going to rise up and rail about consumer-level AVMs. Today was that day, it seems.

This is Rotarian Socialism in action. The so-called regulatory body serves at the beck and call of the putatively-regulated industry. They have no hope of doing anything but making themselves look ridiculous in public, but they have to answer to their allegedly regulated masters no matter what.

If this kind of corruption is just now making you sick — you haven’t been paying attention…

Further notice: Official Zillow.com response from David Gibbons:

Lloyd Frink, Zillow’s President asked me to convey this official response to you, Greg:

“We strongly believe that providing Zestimates in Arizona is completely legal (and in fact an important public service), given that Zestimates are the result of our ‘automated valuation model’ and are not a formal appraisal. The Arizona Board of Appraisals relies on USPAP, the national professional standards for appraisers, and USPAP Advisory Opinion to determine propriety of activities. Here is the relevant opinion on this matter (Advisory Opinion 18): http://commerce.appraisalfoundation.org/html/2006%20USPAP/ao18.htm As you can see, it reads: ‘The output of an AVM is not, by itself, an appraisal.'”

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April 11, 2007

Birth of a Zillow.bot: A faster way to pee on the tree

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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…

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April 9, 2007

More random notes on Zillow.com: Conquering fear, uncertainty and doubt to become the neighborhood superhero

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Michael Wurzer and others are tying themselves up in knots trying to prove that they understand what Zillow is doing wrong. My take is that they don’t even understand what Zillow is doing, so, necessarily, it’s going to look wrong to them from their frame of reference.

I said this the other day, and I thought I did a nice job, twenty-five words on the nose:

Web 2.0 creates an ongoing community of active users by integrating a user-modifiable database through an interactive, as opposed to static, web-based interface.

The important word is “community.” Wikipedia.org is not building a database of encyclopedia articles. Ebay.com is not building a database of merchandise.

Criticizing — or praising — Zillow about its databases is all but completely beside the point. They’re not building databases. They’re using databases — and incentives to user-initiated database maintenance — to create a self-sustaining community of users.

Ebay.com is not a reproducible phenomenon. Wikipedia.org is not a reproducible phenomenon. The technology is easy. Venture capital abounds. But the niches are already occupied, and neither of those two communities can be replaced as long as they are serving the needs of their members. It does not matter how much money you throw at the problem, they cannot be supplanted.

This is what Zillow.com is aiming for, in my opinion. The listing.bot traffic is nothing. It doesn’t amount to a fart in a gale of wind. Zillow’s own very impressive traffic is nothing, as we’ll see in a moment. What they want is a community of users as loyal as the Wikipedians, and potentially as profitable to its professional users as Ebay is.

Let’s look at the numbers: Zillow is getting four million hits a month, it says — with others saying otherwise. If each of those four million users is visiting three pages on average — which seems like a lot to me — then we’re looking at twelve million pageviews a month. It’s possible they do better than this, but it doesn’t much matter, as we’ll see. Assume three EZ Ads per page — where the average for now is probably closer to one. That boils Read more

April 6, 2007

Web site builds community of real estate consumers, vendors

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link).

This is adapted from my main post Tuesday night, of course. I get 350 words in the paper. They cut me today to 330, so I used my own version of the text for the permanent link.

But here’s the sad part: This is breaking news in the Republic. This is the first word of Zillow’s new release to appear in the newspaper. Aren’t you glad you have a choice about where to get your news?

 
Web site builds community of real estate consumers, vendors

Zillow.com, the national Realty.bot growing out of the popular automated home valuation service, released a new version of its popular web-based software Tuesday night. The system’s new functionality comes in three broad categories:

  • Any user of the system — not just homeowners or their real estate agents — will be able to report that a particular home is for sale and at what price. Only owners and/or listing agents will be able to create more elaborate listings for homes for sale.
  • Any user of the site will be able to ask or answer a specific question about a home, whether or not it is listed for sale. The questions and answers will be stored with the record for that home, and each user’s questions, answers and Zillow Wiki contributions will be recorded on that user’s personal profile page on the system.
  • Agents or other users wishing to promote either themselves or their homes listed for sale will be able to do so through a new “EZ Ads” system. The ads will be sold by the zip-code at a cost of one-penny per impression.

“With this release, Zillow becomes a community,” said David Gibbons, the company’s Director of Community Relations. Zillow’s home value “Zestimates” have been very popular with home sellers. Zillow.com is giving buyers and Realtors incentives to join its community.

Zillow wants agents to submit at least limited-data listings, which will in turn bring it buyers, which will in turn reward sellers and listing agents for inputting full-data listings and other information, which will in turn provide a stickier and more satisfying experience for buyers. Read more

April 5, 2007

Why doesn’t Zillow.com act like Trulia.com? Because life is short but art is long . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathy had lunch today with a friend and ex-colleague. Cathy was talking about Zillow.com as a Web 2.0 phenomenon, and her friend was having trouble wrapping her mind around the idea of Web 2.0.

I sent her mail when I heard about this, summarizing and quoting from the seminal Tim O’Reilly article:

In an elevator speech: Web 2.0 creates an ongoing community of active users by integrating a user-modifiable database through an interactive, as opposed to static, web-based interface.

This is O’Reilly’s summary:

Web 2.0 Design Patterns

In his book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander prescribes a format for the concise description of the solution to architectural problems. He writes: “Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”

  1. The Long Tail
    Small sites make up the bulk of the internet’s content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet’s the possible applications. Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
  2. Data is the Next Intel Inside
    Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data.
  3. Users Add Value
    The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore: Don’t restrict your “architecture of participation” to software development. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application.
  4. Network Effects by Default
    Only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application. Therefore: Set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application.
  5. Some Rights Reserved. Intellectual property protection limits re-use and prevents experimentation. Therefore: When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design Read more
April 5, 2007

Zynergy: They searched for a house, but they found you

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This ad:

Appeared this morning next to Cathy’s listing in the FQ Story Historic District of Phoenix.

As I said last night, I think all this kvetching and caviling is beside the point. You have a chance to put your marketing message in front of your share of four million visitors a month for free. If you do nothing more than create a profile page, your web site will gain an inbound link from a site with a Page Rank of seven, a fulsome offering to the Church of Googolatry. I had 37 page views on my profile yesterday, which is amazing considering that I have added almost nothing to the site.

My pet theme for the year is: Control your own marketing. It becomes ever more clear that various types of lead vendors want to soak up as much as half of your commissions — even before your broker stuffs his bear-like paw in your pocket. The more you can do to make your own rain as cheaply as possible, the better your chances of earning at least a starvation wage in our “overpaid” profession.

Take a chance and play with Zillow’s new toys. I don’t know that this will work. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost nothing but your time. But if it does, you will gain control of a whole new marketing channel.

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April 4, 2007

Zillow 5 is here, and, whether or not you seize upon its opportunities, it isn’t going away

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A day later, I think it’s all over but the shouting. There have been a small few objections, some earnest, some spurious, but, in the end, none of it matters. Zillow 5 is here, and it isn’t going away. Brian Brady and I have talked about how you might take advantage of the new functionality in Zillow. But take advantage or don’t, Zillow 5 is here.

Last night I explicitly addressed the conjecture that publicizing a home for sale is, colorably, advertising. I argue that it’s a material fact, not a solicitation to buy. But even if MLS systems or the NAR should rule otherwise, this would impact only Realtors. Anyone else could report these facts, picking them off of any one of dozens of Realtors’ IDX systems — to put exactly the right point on the candor behind the complaints. When little vendors see the sole of a big boot right overhead, we expect them to shriek. But their caviling will come to nothing. Zillow 5 is here.

In the same way, worrying about bad behavior that might but so far has not happened seems unlikely to move Zillow.com off its position. There may well be acts of malice, and Zillow will have to respond in a quick and measured way or risk losing all the decent people it is trying to attract. If it fails at this, it fails, but I doubt it’s going to quit the arena in response to so-far unfounded worries. Zillow 5 is here.

If there is a peril to feared from Zillow.com, it is here: This company has gone from a world-shaking AVM to a radical listings platform to a national residential real estate marketplace in fourteen months. This last round of revisions — adding many new pages and vast new capacity — took four months. If this advertising play does not pay off, could it turn itself into a national semi-automated real estate brokerage? You bet. In six months at the outside.

Will that happen? Hide and watch. Would it be a moral wrong if it did? We know exactly what we say to the crybaby union Read more

April 4, 2007

Going Fishing? Try to Land the Whales

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

If you are a Boiler Room movie fan, you’ll remember when Ben Affleck’s character said,

ACT…AS IF

“Act as if...” meant that you got on the telephone and asked people who were loaded to invest money. You didn’t worry about your youthful appearance, inexperience, or immaturity because they would never see you.
Can a new or underemployed Realtor who has sold 4 houses with a median price point of $200,000 effectively compete against a seasoned veteran of the real estate brokerage game in the tony zip code of 92657 ?

Use Zillow EZ Ads to “Act as if”

Your chances of landing the whale on Zillow are much better than farming for minnows.

April 4, 2007

Do You Zlog? Making the Zillow Real Estate Guide Work For You

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Do you Zlog? Let me define Zlogging on Zillow.com for you.

Zillow solicited listings this past fall from Realtors and announced the Zillow Real Estate Guide (formerly known as the wiki). I was a huge critic of the practice of posting listings because I felt their intentions were disingenuous. I did notice a cool “back door” to their changes that could promote the businesses of Realtors and loan originators. That back door was the Zillow real estate wiki and I saw it as an opportunity to use Zillow as a personal weblog. So, a Zlogging I did go.

The results were astounding. My personal weblog received 6-7 times the traffic within the first 2-3 days of my Zlog post and I received a call about a loan for a home in Mexico. I took it a step further and started posting “teasers” on Zillow in order to drive the traffic higher. It wasn’t completely altruistic nor within the spirit of the Wiki. I was caught red-handed by the Zillow cops and gently coaxed into more corrective behavior. My more toned down Zlogs were still driving traffic to my website while providing useful information to a consumer.

I walked in the back door, was thrown out by the Zillow bouncers, and invited back to the party through the front door. It was that defining moment that caused me to realize that Zillow has juice. If I can provide useful consumer content, they can deliver hits to my weblog. That seemed reasonable enough to me.

This latest announcement from Zillow, comprehensively analyzed by Bloodhound Blog, provides an amazing opportunity for the Realtor or loan originator to promote their practice on a national and local scale. Greg Swann explained how the practitioner can “mark their turf” in a zip code to gain expertise in the consumers’ eyes by farming via the Zillow Q&A feature. I will show you how to generate referral business by establishing expertise on a national level by Zlogging..

Understand that Zillow is extremely consumer centric and is striving to deliver Read more

April 4, 2007

Random observations on the new Zillow.com feature set

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Your profile can include an embedded YouTube video.

Your profile photo is going to be reduced to 66 pixels in width, so if you scale it to that size before uploading, you’ll get marginally better quality. (Or is it 100 pixels tall?)

In general, photo scaling seems pretty fuzzy to me. For your own listings, it’s worth your while to scale to their width (267 pixels?) before you upload. (Or is it 200 pixels tall?)

The text editor for your profile is blog-like except that UTF-8 high order characters are being dumbed down to 7-bit ASCII, so you might as well dumb them down yourself — again to keep quality control.

The Wiki text editor will smart paste, like the ActiveRain editor, but it won’t retain your CSS. That means you’ll probably have to blow in an extra return between paragraphs. I don’t know if you can past in raw HTML, which would be my preference.

How’s business? Zillow.com’s David Gibbons:

Site traffic is definitely up though it’s not as much of a vicious spike as say when the WSJ story suddenly hit in February. It’ll be interesting to see what MSM pickup there is through the rest of the week. Early activity around Q&A and EZ Ads looks great with a fair amount of “testing” going on — I’m impressed by how quickly some questions were answered. EZ Ads in particular is looking surprisingly good. A few advertisers are testing ads in multiple (>10) zip codes. Too early to tell the impact on for sale postings but it looks like a bunch of homes have already been reported for sale.

A bunch from me. I’d love to be able to do this with a tab- or comma-delimited file. Even typing into a form would be faster. If the house is already listed, Zillow can ignore me.

Page loads do not seem to me to be inordinately slow.

 
Further notice: I said: “I’d love to be able to do this with a tab- or comma-delimited file. Even typing into a form would be faster.” In retrospect, this multi-step, manual entry is a passive barrier against the kinds of vandalism Jonathan Read more

April 3, 2007

Planet Zillow.com: Burgeoning Realty.bot grows, potentially, to become a self-sustaining residential real estate eco-system

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the news. We’ll circle back for details and implications.

Zillow.com, the national Realty.bot growing out of the popular automated home valuation service, is releasing a new version of its popular web-based real estate portal tonight. Dubbed Zillow 5, the new functionality comes in three broad categories:

  • Any user of the system — not just homeowners or their real estate agents — will be able to report that a particular home is for sale and at what price. Only owners and/or listing agents will be able to create more elaborate listings for homes for sale.
  • Any user of the site will be able to ask or answer a specific question about a home, whether or not it is listed for sale. The questions and answers will be stored with the record for that home, and each user’s questions, answers and Real Estate Guide (formerly known as the Zillow Wiki) contributions will be recorded on that user’s personal profile page on the system.
  • Agents or other users wishing to promote either themselves or their homes listed for sale will be able to do so through a new “EZ Ads” system. In appearance, the ads will look like a cross between a button ad and a Google AdWords text ad: a headline, two lines of text, an outbound link and an image — a logo or a photo. Unlike AdWords ads, the billing will be pay-per-impression, not pay-per-click. The ads will be sold by the zip-code at a cost of one-penny per impression. Ads targeted at a particular zip-code will rotate at random to exhaust the advertiser’s pre-paid spend over a pre-set span of time.

BloodhoundBlog features extensive coverage of tonight’s announcement from Zillow.com:

BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will also be covering the story at these sites:

BloodhoundBlog has published more about Zillow.com than any other weblog or publication.

“With this release, Zillow becomes a community,” said David Gibbons, the company’s Director of Community Relations. That’s true, but it’s somewhat Read more

April 3, 2007

A screen-shot tour of Zillow.com’s new feature set

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Amending this: The site is live with Zillow.com founders Richard Barton and Lloyd Frink as the first Q&A links:

These are screen shots I captured during a teleconference with Zillow.com Directory of Community Relations, David Gibbons. Everything is scaled to fit the weblog column, so the live pages, when they become available will look different.


A Realtor-listed home with the Q&A panel. The listing agent’s contact information is shown at the right.


Detail of the full Q&A panel. The hot links will click through to user profile pages.


A user profile page with phone numbers plus email and web page links, along with links to all user-supplied content.


A home that is not listed for sale.


A home that has been listed for sale by a user other than the owner or listing agent. On the right is a link to that user’s profile page.


EZ Ads as they will appear on each page, three ads to a page, cycling at any page refresh.


The EZ Ads creation template. You have control over what you advertise, how much you spend and how quickly your ad buy is deployed. An ad will consist of a headline, an image, two lines of text and a clickable link to a page within or outside of Zillow.com.


The EZ Ads billing page. There is no automated billing/recurring for now.


The EZ Ads confirmation screen.


EZ Ads stats, very rudimentary for now. Zillow plans to improve upon this in the future.

BloodhoundBlog features extensive coverage of tonight’s announcement from Zillow.com:

BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will also be covering the story at these sites:

BloodhoundBlog has published more about Zillow.com than any other weblog or publication.

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April 3, 2007

Zillow.com’s press release detailing added functionality in new software release

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Zillow.com™ Launches Home Q&A

“Ask Questions, Share Answers”at the heart of numerous new features harnessing knowledge of agents, homeowners and neighbors

Seattle — April 4, 2007 — Real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced the launch of Zillow™ Home Q&A, among other new features aimed at further opening the site up to community contributions. Home Q&A is the ability for anyone to ask questions and share information and insight about more than 70 million U.S. homes.

“The release of Zillow Home Q&A enables anyone to ask any question about any house for the Zillow community to answer,” said Rich Barton, Zillow CEO. “This is the next step in our quest to help make everyone smarter about real estate. A quest that began with publishing Zestimate™ values last year as a starting point to answer the critical question, ‘How much is this home worth?’ Since then, we have enabled homeowners and agents to update home facts, post homes for sale, and set their Make Me Move™ prices. Over half a million people have made these contributions so far, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface in helping people get answers to critical real estate questions.”

Visitors to Zillow.com can now “ask a question” or “answer a question” about millions of homes, right on that home’s Zillow Web page. Anyone can rate answers as “helpful” or “not helpful,” and each contribution links back to a user’s profile page — telling visitors, for example, if the question was answered by a local agent or other real estate professional, or if the contributor frequently answers questions within the Zillow community.

“Today, some of the most colorful and important information about homes and real estate is trapped inside the heads of local experts — agents, homeowners and neighbors,” said Lloyd Frink, Zillow president. “By allowing people to freely ask questions and share information online about homes, we hope to unlock, for the community as a whole, a powerful vault of data — such as an agent sharing insight into a neighborhood, or a potential buyer asking the shortest commute route downtown.”

In addition to Home Q&A, other new features announced Read more

April 3, 2007

Podcast with David Gibbons, Zillow.com’s Director of Community Relations: “We are throwing the gates wide open to the entire community”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Appended below is an audio podcast with David Gibbons, Director of Community Relations for Zillow.com. In this recording, David talks with me, reflecting upon the details and implications of tonight’s new software release.

RE.net readers know David as the voice of Zillow on real estate weblogs, effecting the small miracle detailed in The Cluetrain Manifesto: Engaging in the conversation of the marketplace in a way that shows that Zillow will do what it can to ameliorate difficulties. I happen to know that he’s good at that job, because I have a talent for cultivating difficulties.

Until tonight, David’s title was Director of Customer Service. In addition to tending to the concerns of the RE.net, he was charged with dealing with the email and phone calls a site as busy as Zillow.com incites. He talks a little about that on the podcast.

David is originally from South Africa, which accounts for his accent. Before working for Zillow.com, he worked for Amazon.com.

BloodhoundBlog features extensive coverage of tonight’s announcement from Zillow.com:

BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will also be covering the story at these sites:

BloodhoundBlog has published more about Zillow.com than any other weblog or publication.

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February 20, 2007

So what’s changed at Zillow.com?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last look before going to bed, I saw this image at Drew Meyers’ very insightful Insights weblog:

I bumped it up in FireFox and got the same image. Then I hit refresh and got a normal Zillow.com home page.

What had changed?

I know this won’t last, but I love it that I can bug people who work for multi-million dollar corporations in the dead of the night and have them answer me. I emailed Drew, and he replied in half an instant:

[W]e changed our wiki landing page, added page counters, and fixed some bugs.

The page counters are the primary feature that we added — which I think is a VERY cool feature (that numerous users requested). For instance, check this random house I just pulled up in Phoenix and scroll to the bottom of the page – http://www.zillow.com/HomeDetails.htm?zprop=7786893

This is the counter from that page, clipped to fit:

A small enough change, I suppose, but most big things are accretions of little things. And we didn’t have to wait to find out what had changed…

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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