Zillow.com is pretty cool. Not at all cool that it doesn’t support (read: actively prohibits) Safari. So, you have to install Firefox to check it out. Zillow.com proposes to tell you the current market value of your house. They’ve incorporated the now required satellite maps which is kind of cool. You can see the values of houses in your neighborhood, or more to the point, you can find out what your neighbor paid for her place. So, it’s pretty cool.
More interesting to me is the rhetoric that Zillow.com has started in the realtor community. This article from BusinessWeek provides an overview. Google something like zillow realtor marketing and you’ll get a sampling. The upshot is that realtors are pointing out that the data is inaccurate and that the valuations cannot be trusted because they do not come from a human realtor. I ran my house. Zillow.com knew the correct date that I bought the house but the zillowistimate was ridiculous.
I was glad to see the day come when I no longer had to use a travel agent. It was always tedious to have to work through them. Especially when I knew that what I was asking was possible but the travel agent made more money by telling me it wasn’t. I don’t necessarily want to see real estate agents go the way of travel agents. More, I would rather see real estate agents bring some game to the party. Many of them don’t.
aloha
[posted with ecto]
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