Tag Archives: Zillow

Zillow.com says "MAKE ME Move"

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[photopress:logo.gif,thumb,alignright]LOL, it’s going to be one of those fun days on the Internet. It really has been way too quiet, except for Greg’s Bubble War, so I’m glad for a little excitement.

At 9 p.m. PST, Zillow is unveiling their newest major upgrade which allows both consumers and agents to upload their homes and listings…apparently, whether they are for sale…or not! This is going to be fun.

I’m planning to be one of the first to get a house in there before the East Coast wakes up. Let’s see how easy it is and whether or not it works yet.

There will be For Sale by Owners side by side with Agent Listings and a place for what we in the industry generally call “Pocket Listings”. People who might move, if you offered them a price that would make it worth their while to get out. That’s the fun part. Not that Zillow.com hasn’t already been a lot of fun as it is.

One interviewer today from L.A. asked me if the “Make Me move” category would really be of value to anyone who didn’t have a very expensive and unique property. I think it will be a great opportunity for people who cannot list their home for sale right now, but are planning to move sometime in the near future. People who are going to list their home in the Spring. People who are going to move when their child graduates from high school in June. People who will be listing their home when they reach their two year ownership requirement to avoid capital gains taxes. Pretty much anyone who is not quite ready to move right now, but would like to say to the public at large “Make Me move!” at x price, and then we’ll talk about when I’m willing to actually get out 🙂

So it should be a very exciting day. I’m off to see if I can upload a listing.

Zestimates & Seasons Change

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[photopress:weather.jpg,thumb,alignright]Well, I’ve been busy putting the finishing touches on Real Property Associates and Preferred Real Estate (registration required and in beta) websites. I’m looking forward to taking some time off from consulting/coding and combining the best aspects of both sites in my next iteration of RCG’s Zearch. (so many cool ideas to implement, so little time). Anyway, if your RSS feeds start to break or things start to appear in Spanish, it’s all my fault. At any rate, if I implement something interesting, I’ll blog about it.

Anyway, it’s been an eventful month while I’ve been too busy to blog. Here’s the month’s highlights for me.

Zillow makes the big time
You know you’ve made it when somebody complains to the government about you or otherwise starts a legal action against you. Greg on the BloodhoundBlog and Joel on the Future of Real Estate Marketing has all the gory details and the play by play action on the NCRC complaint to the FTC regarding Zillow. Frankly, I prefer it when Zestimates are too low. It’s keeps downward pressure on the county assessor’s desire to collect all the property taxes he thinks he’s entitled to. I only want a high Zestimate when I sell the house, when I’m living in it (which the typical case), I want it to be low! Hopefully this will blow over like a winter storm. Besides, nobody complains when the local weather report is 10% off (which has a bigger day to day impact on me than an inaccurate zestimate does). Speaking of which, has anybody else started building their ark yet?

I’ll never trust an integrated NIC again
This past month, marked the 3rd time in the past 2 years that a machine with an integrated NIC (that’s just fancy way of saying the machine’s motherboard that has a built-in network adapter) died or otherwise corrupted Window’s network stack on me. When it happens on a personal machine, it’s very annoying and when it happens on a server with paying customers it’s much worse. Maybe having FIOS at home or running a server is much harder on a NIC, than a cable/DSL is. Whatever the cause, I’m tired of dealing with poorly debugged network cards & drivers. From now on, I’m paying the extra $20-$40 bucks for a stand-alone Intel or 3com network card and I’m only trusting NICs that MS includes drivers for on the Windows CD. (For what’s its worth, it’s seems Linux folks are having similar issues w/ nVidia chip set NICs too, so I know it’s not a case of Windows sucking since every Intel or 3Com NIC I used in the past 6 years hasn’t given me a single minute of grief). Oh well, I just had to vent since that mishap cost me a day of my life, I won’t get back.

Changing of the leaves and the tile servers
John L Scott’s PR folks informed me that their site now has Bird’s Eye images for Portland, OR. The more interesting thing is that MS appears to have updated a lot of their aerial imagery on Virtual Earth recently. If you visit a site that uses the newer Virtual Earth control (such as local.live.com), you notice that Seattle’s images appear to be have been updated with photography from a fall evening (with better resolution) while the Eastside’s images still appear to be photographed during a summer afternoon.

Perhaps future versions of Microsoft’s & Google’s map offerings will have night/day and seasonal maps/aerial photography? Either way, it’s interesting to see the changing of the map tile servers coincide the changing of the leaves. (regardless if it was intentional or accidental). Speaking of the mapping wars, it’s going to get a lot more interesting tomorrow since MS is releasing a new Virtual Earth control tomorrow.

Zillow your life – it's quite interesting

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I grew up at 4950 Lancaster Avenue My parents purchased it for $7,000 in 1957 or so. They made nothing on it and it is now the hole that you see between the buildings. But they raised seven children there. I lived there from age 3 to age 20 or so when my Dad died. I say it owes them nothing for housing nine people there for 17 years. The entire neighborhood that still exists, only values out at $15,000 max. That’s only a 50% return over a fifty year timeframe. Yes, there are “wrong” places to buy property! Always has been and always will be…ALL property does not go UP! (or down) in equal proportions.

In 1973 when my Dad died, my Mom moved to 6626 Haddington Street I remember her picking up the phone and leaving messages on the answering machines of every real estate office in town. She said I have $8,000. If you have a house to sell for $8,000, call me. According to Zillow, that house has now increased by 470%. My Mom was always a little smarter than my Dad…but my Dad was a cool dude 🙂 I don’t remember exactly what my Mom sold it for in 1980, but I do remember that she got at least double what she paid, had a non-taxable gain AND carried a portion of the price as a mortgage to the purchaser, with a double digit interest rate. That house owes her nothing either.

I moved out by the time she sold that house in 1980. In fact my Mom followed me to Northeast Philly. I rented. She bought a house for $18,000 on Fairdale now valued by Zillow at about $55,000. She sold it for $46,000 or so. It is now worth three times what she paid for it, but she took most of the equity out when she left. I bought this house in Kipling Place in 82 for $45,000 and sold in in 84 or $65,000. Zillow values it at $74,000 now, so looks like I pulled most of the equity out of that one. Me and my Mom seem to be doing pretty good pulling equity out and getting in and out at the right times.

Gotta go and I want to see if these Zillow links last. I’ll pick up in 1985 in another post.

Enjoying the Blog Business Summit in Seattle

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I’m currently attending the Blog Business Summit at the Bell Harbor Conference Center at Pier 66 in Seattle. It’s a beautiful facility (and wifi works well!).

The first session led by Jason Calacanis was a great and very personal history about blogging. If I had to summarize his talk in a few words, it would be about the importance of authenticity. With a great list of speakers, (including Robert Scoble whose blogging about Jason’s announcement of a new podcast on PodTech) it should be a great couple of days!

As I learn stuff at the conference, I’ll try to put together updates of things that I’m learning!

(By the way, I randomly sat down next to Drew Meyers of Zillow,and I’ve already ran across Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems)

UPDATE: Just noticed that Drew has a personal blog where he has a great summary of Jason’s talk.

Speaking of Trojan Horses!

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After reading John Cooks blog, ‘Beware of what you post on Zillow?‘ I started to think, how much is to much??? Much like my last post about the ‘Trojan Horse‘ are we all becoming so connected that it makes sense for the County Assessor to start using these tools as a way to fuel the County. In my case, King County Assessor Scott Noble was even quoted as saying, “the new Zillow service could be used as a tool to make sure that homeowners are paying their “fair share.” If the KC Assessor’s office would have used Zilllow’s Zestimate for the tax assessed value of a home LTD Real Estate just sold they would have almost doubled the tax bill. That would mean from this home alone, $2,601.51 more towards the bottom line. Hopefully Ron Sims doesn’t read this blog post…

I think I am going to keep my home information my own information.

Zillow 2.0 is out – Westlake Village start your photocopiers

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The folks at Zillow have just released an update to their web site (which first launched in February earlier this year). You can find out more details from the Zillow Blog.

The Cool:
One of the coolest features are scrollable heat-maps (frankly, I thought they’d do this, because it’s been on my Zearch 2.0 To-Do List for the past 4 months). So when you zoom around the map view, check “show heat map” check box, zoom out to the city level or higher, and see Zestimate/sq ft color coded all pretty like on the map. This is slick.

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Another thing they’ve done is add is what they call MyZillow. The feature allows users to keep track of their favorite homes from one central location. You can create your own estimate (and make it public), add facts about your home to supplement the public record and compare it to right next to the Zestimate.

The Lame:
The map page now has 3 banner ads it (2 of which were animated). Although, I understand Zillow’s business model is based on the ads, I think they would be better served by having fewer ads. Even realtor.com only has 2 banner ads on it’s major pages. I hope the next release doesn’t have pop-unders and “hit the monkey for a free iPod” ads.

The Deep Thought:
What will happen if disgruntled reators (or hackers) start entering bogus supplemental data into their MyZillow? Will it effect Zestimates negatively?
Anyway, congrats to the Zillow guys for pushing the envelope a little further. It’ll be very interesting to see what version 3.0 holds and see how far Zillow can push that deCarta DDS box that they have sitting in their data-center.

Sharing the spam – Is Zillow going to China?

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[photopress:spam.jpg,full,alignright]I got an interesting piece of investor spam yesterday. This one was so interesting, I figured I share it and give somebody a good laugh or chuckle. Apparently they are talking up a company in China that has “pilfered every costly lesson learned by Rich Barton and pals… plus every breakthrough technology Microsoft gladly spent $100 million to develop their own business with optimized Rich Barton’s billion-dollar baby.”

I had lunch with some of the folks from Zillow today. Even though they know Rich Barton better than I do, they didn’t even know about this opprotunity! They also said, they wanted in on the action… 🙂

Anyway, here’s my spam for your reading enjoyment…

Rich Barton Spam

And if you figure out what exactly they’re talking about, let me know. 😉

RPA Zearch – Now with Turbo Zillow!

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OK, I admit it. I got early access to the Zillow API. 🙂 And it’s pretty interesting stuff, it provides Zestimate values, comparable properties, Zestimates charts, and Zindex charts. Anyway, everybody knows I’ve done Zestimates before, but the charts are a new wrinkle I haven’t had the opprotunity to explore yet.

As some of you know, I’ve been working with Gordon & Jay of Real Property Associates (old site) to develop their new site (beta). Although the site is about a month away from going live, I thought I’d let the world know so they beta test my favorite new Zearch feature which I call “Turbo Zillow”.

So if you run a search for Eastside communities, below the map (sorry about the lack of pushpins folks – the server is having a bad geo-coding day), you’ll notice the new Zillow control. The control will populate with every city & zip code that was in your search results. (PS – Will the agent who entered a 00000 zip code into the MLS for MLS# 25147354, please fix it, don’t get me started). It will then let you plot a Zindex chart based off location, dollar/percent appreciation, and 1/5/10 year durations. So the control, looks like something like this…

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This is really cool, because getting a new chart, is as simple and changing the drop downs to what your interested in, and the watching the chart change. Comparing city & zip codes median price histories has never been this easy on Zillow. The details page of a listing will also have a Zillow control that will show the chart of the listing, the zip, the city, the state, and the USA in the same way. Currently. the details version of the control appears to have a bug with getting the USA chart if Zillow can’t find the Zestimate. So if you see something that is way off. it could be my bug, or it could be Zillow’s bad Zestimate. Either way, I think charts & data visualization are the next big thing for MLS searches after everybody gets the AJAX maps out of their system.

On the Zillow site, to get this information, I have to click here for Bellevue, click back, click here for Redmond, and then back, and then click here for Kirkland. Why do they make getting Zindex charts so hard? I have to scroll to the bottom page, for everything and then click? Why can’t you do some Web 2.0 map magic instead of a sea of links (or just put the links it at the top of the page)?

OK, enough mini-flaming, I have to give credit were credit is due and I thank the crew at Zillow for having the guts to release an API to the public and having the courage to let me put it through it’s paces. Perhaps my experiments will inspire them to greater things, more APIs and a better UI for the Zindex pages? Until then, I’m using “Turbo Zillow” for my ZIndex fix.

Visit http://www.rpare.com/search.aspx, do your thing, have fun the fast lane my friends!

Top 10 List of Real Estate Lists

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That’s right, I’m going meta-meta. Or better yet, I’m going mega meta (unlike Greg who went mini meta! 🙂 ).

  1. Hanan’s irregular list of new real estate blogs. Beautiful idea, perfectly executed. It is interesting to note that almost none of blogs from his first installment are still around writing interesting content…
  2. 10 Best Women Bloggers. Because it matters.
  3. 3 Easy Steps to Stop Zillow from Publishing the Zestimate of your Home… Because it doesn’t matter (and it still generates a ton of hits).
  4. Curbed’s Broker Boys and Babes Contest. No one else could have done this right.
  5. Curb Appeal Enthusiasm. Simple. Relevant. Useful. Interesting.
  6. 21 reasons to bank on the Phoenix real estate market… Should serve as a great warning to agents writing about the bubble… Be prepared to take the issue on like Greg or don’t even go there… (and I simply can’t ignore his list of blogs that feed a hungry mind.)
  7. The consistently growing list of neighborhood videos from TurnHere… I’m addicted.
  8. The PMI Group’s list of cities with the riskiest housing market. (This is a personal favorite since they traditionally rank Seattle as one of the least risky places to invest in real estate.
  9. Another ego item for the list… I check out the technorati site multiple times a day to find out if anyone is linking to RCG. But technorati provides so much more like keyword searches of blog posts and keyword searches of blogs. I similar argument could be made for del.icio.us since it is so darn useful for finding good content!
  10. Ardell’s list of posts for buyers and for sellers make up an incredible, wild, colorful, useful list of content.

And the worst real estate lists?

  1. I have only one: PubSub. This great concept is in desperate need of some algorithm love. For starters, if they are not going to count blogrolls each day, then they have to be consistent. For example, the Seattle PI Real Estate blog shows up #1 day in and day out because PubSub thinks that all the PI blogs are giving a fresh link to PI Real Estate blog every time they post a new blog entry. In reality, it is simply a function of their blog being on the blogroll of all the PI blogs. In addition, many features (like their URL detail page) have been broken for most of their existence. Lazy-coding issues like this make their tool nearly useless.

Required Reading…

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Another list of 10:

  1. Worth reiterating: Polly’s comments should be required reading for all agents (including the comments within the post about her comments! 🙂 ).
  2. Claudia Wicks lets us know about this “genealogy” site geared toward homes instead of people… The site includes maps, photos, etc.
  3. Also, are press releases still valuable? A quick search on Claudia shows that a recent press release she put out about being one of the Top Woman Real Estate bloggers dominates the coverage of her name on a google search. Fascinating.
  4. Artemi just emailed me to let me know that he just released a major upgrade to his real estate search site for England. The features that stick out for me are the simplicity, the tags for each property, and the natural language search (like the fact that the site also pre-fills in the search box with relevant tags). Great stuff…
  5. Interesting to read Jim’s perspective on the new website he is building with Ubertor. From what I’ve seen, the website definitely suffices as far as websites go, but if I was searching for an agent, I’d say his blog does a much better job selling himself.
  6. Searchlight had a follow up to their renting is for suckers article that describes some reasons a person should not buy a house. I can’t tell if they read my comment, but they clearly addressed some of the issues I brought up.
  7. Joel gives some insight into the art of being good enough…
  8. And then follows it up with news that Prudential is jumping on the Zillow API bandwagon.
  9. My take? Here are the ingredients for housingmaps style publicity: map. geocode. data1. data2.
  10. Jim’s worth noting column reminded me that I really wanted to mention DataPlace at some point. I saw a presentation of this tool at Where2.0 and was very impressed with the massive amount of neighborhood, demographic, socio-economic, etc. data that the Fannie May Foundation has manage to squeeze into their interface (and it is all free!). To give an overview, check out the massive amount of mortgage information available for the Seattle-Bellevue area or better yet, check out the map that I was able to easy build on post on my site of home ownership rates in the area: