You may have heard of the new site Zillow.com or maybe seen it in our Movers and Shakers recently. It made a big splash with a media blitz that was impressive; I read news stories, heard it mentioned repeatedly on the radio and saw it posted on blogs everywhere.
What is it? It will tell you the value of your home... or of any home for that matter. It combines a magical cocktail of hot technologies and real estate.
Cool thing 1: Plug in your zip code and it gives you a satellite map of your neighborhood. The map is draggable, just like Google Maps.
Cool thing 2: You can get a satellite map, a street map, or a hybrid map.
Cool thing 3: As you zoom in, it will show you property lines and estimated values of the homes.
Cool thing 4: Click on a property and a ballon pops up with estimated price (they call it "Zestimated price") address and home details like number of bedrooms and bathrooms and square footage.
Cool thing 5: Click on home details and it shows you enough to make your head spin. Value of your home plotted on a graph over the last year, 5 years, etc. Plus lot size, year built, # stories, and more.
Cool thing 6: Click on comparable homes and it shows you a clickable map with all the recently sold homes in your area. Click them and sale price, date sold, details of the home, etc.
That's a pretty neat trick. So, how do they do it? The data has always been out there -- Satellite maps, Street Maps, Property Line maps, Sale prices of homes, etc... What Zillow did was bring them together into the ultimate Monopoly mash-up. This is an example of what Web 2.0 is supposed to bring us, data from disparate sources, mashed up together into cool new apps. I suspect these guys did it the old-fashioned hard way with partnerships and the like, but there is no mistaking the flavor of it all.
Zillows - site info
