February 8th, 2006
Curious About Your Home’s Value? Zillow Knows
By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
Wondering about your home’s value, especially in these times when talk of housing bubbles abound? Zillow.com could be of help. In the past, I’ve either called a realtor or used one of those housing sites like HomeGain; with those you can get a free drive-by evaluation of your home (without getting the realtor’s hopes up). The site says it has data and valuations (Zestimates) on 60,000,000+ homes in the U.S., and there are an estimated 85 million single-family homes in the country according to Spencer Raskoff, Zillow.com’s chief financial officer and vice president of marketing.
Alice Adds, Before You Try It: We tested this and the key to adding in home improvements like new windows, a bathroom remodel, and even small items like new faucets are done by pressing the “Next” button at the top of the page. ( I was able to get my total value up another $31,000 this way.) This is hard to understand when you first try the program. Once you hit next - it will walk you through many screens where you can add in everything you’ve ever done to your home. Hint: be sure to print out your hard work - there is no save feature.
Alice Adds (again): The above example was my first apt in San Francisco (a 2 apt home.) I’ll bet the owners are feeling pretty happy right now!
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EvanWasHere says:
You have to click “NEXT” which is in the middle of the page to get to the remodeling, patio, etc additions.
February 8th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
Michael Santo says:
Ah, OK. They should put that down at the bottom since your attention is drawn there anyway.
February 8th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
Liam says:
I checked for my area in New Jersey and the prices were out by over $200,000 (yes, two hundred thousand). So some data is more current than other obviously!
February 9th, 2006 at 3:38 am
Don Schaaf says:
I had a hunch it was too good to be really true. Alas, we “rural” folks, no matter how poor or how wealthy, no matter how stupid or how smart, are generally excluded in things and sites of this nature. I wish; at tax time, the government would overlook us as zillow.com (and the rest of them) overlooks us.
Regards,
Don
February 9th, 2006 at 6:58 am
JIRA: Zillow says:
[ZW-1163] we should add duplicate prev/next buttons at the bottom of the screen in the zestimator
Yup, I saw this blog too: http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2655
If this guy is hitting it, I’m sure others are too.
This would be a worthwhile fix to take quickly.
February 9th, 2006 at 9:23 am
David says:
My name is David and I work at Zillow. I wanted to clarify post #5, since it probably is confusing. I find user comments very useful for Zillow to improve our service for our customers. The above post was a comment I took from this site that I found useful and entered it into our bug database to address. For some reason, that was auto-tracked back to this site. Either way, take it as a sign that we are listening to our customers to make our service fit their needs. Thanks for the feedback.
February 9th, 2006 at 10:28 am
Alice says:
Hi David - thanks for stopping by. Great website. Can you answer user issues on pricing accuracy and rural locations?
February 9th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Keith says:
A few random thoughts on this….
Refering to post #6, you know you are looking at a great development organization when they have a guy who creates feature requests (not really a bug, is it?) in less than a day of an article on RTN!
I wonder if David took Alice’s warning about the absence of a save feature as a clue to open up another “bug” entry in his database. Seems like a good way to encourage people to register.
Kudos to Zillow for supporting Firefox. I know they do because I got this message because I use the Firefox extension ScriptIt, which blocks JavaScript until I allow it for a site: “To enable scripting in Internet Explorer and Firefox…”
I notice they have some incorrect data for my house. They say I have 2.5 BA, when I have 3 full bathrooms (each has bathtub, sink, and toilet). But I’m sure that’s just a problem with where they get their data from. Nevertheless, the site is really impressive, especially the graph of value over time.
February 9th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
Keith says:
Correction: The Firefox extension is called NoScript. ScriptIt was a handy Microsoft scripting tool that I used a few years ago.
February 9th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
The Staunton News Leader says:
Zillow vs. Vamanet
VamaNET, a Staunton company, provides web-based access to property information for counties all over Virginia. You can do advanced searched to narrow your queries down. The service has pictures, and building sketches.
February 10th, 2006 at 6:36 am
Ryan says:
This is Ryan from www.Zillow.com.
We do promise to make every effort to make this information more accurate as time goes on. We gather our data from a number of different resources, and each of those resources have their strengths and weaknesses. While sometimes one city has really good data, another city might have really sparse data. We take the best of all these sources and build out the database that everyone can see from the site. It is our intent as we move out of our Beta phase that we increase the number of methods and the means by which we obtain our data. This only works to improve the accuracy of our Zestimates and hopefully to make the site even more invaluable.
Don, Alice, et al. we are intimately aware of holes in our data and we know this has a higher concentration in rural areas. If you want to know how reliable our data is for an area, please consult this page: http://www.zillow.com/howto/DataCoverageZestimateAccuracy.z
We are looking to include as much data as we can and as soon as possible, but by their very nature rural areas pose us with unique and interesting problems. Trying to build a statistical model to describe metropolitan areas is already a very complex and computative task; trying to describe areas where we have even fewer homes upon which to build that model is even more difficult. If you would like to be notified of when we make significant chages to our site, I encourage you to sign up for our newsletters and check out our blog.
The data we use does not come to us first hand, no one from Zillow has been in each of the 62,000,000+ homes in our database.
/Ryan
www.Zillow.com — We just launched!
February 24th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
HomePriceMaps says:
as far as i know zillow uses tax assessments to estimate the value of a home.
I like to use www.HomePriceMaps.com because they show how much homes were SOLD for using the google mapping technology.
also-if you don’t see HomePriceMaps for your area, simply email them your address and or zip and they’ll update the site within a day or two and send you a follow-up email.
March 13th, 2006 at 10:52 am
workfromhome says:
workfromhome workfromhome
August 6th, 2006 at 7:28 pm