Last week, Zillow launched on the Internet.Zillow's website provides a free home valuation database to anyone who visits it. The company claims it has home values on over 60 million homes in the USA.
Zillow was co-founded by Richard Barton, the guy who founded Expedia.com.
For kicks, I typed in my home's street address, and was impressed that it came up with the same value that I had had in my head. Not bad!
What's also cool is that when it returns a home value, it displays an aerial photograph of the neighborhood pinpointing the property.
So now that folks no longer have to contact a Realtor to get a fair home value, does this bring the professional real estate business closer to an end? Not at all! Consumers will get information for free from the Internet more and more. What they can't get from the Internet is service. And isn't that what a Realtor sells? Service?
If anything tools like Zillow will separate the wheat from the chaff. Realtors who focus on service and performance will find that the Zillow's of the world are making their work a whole lot easier.
3 comments:
Is Zillow good news for realtors? It could be. The California Association of Realtors has done a study [that said that] somebody using the Internet in the transaction spent 1.94 weeks with an agent before making an offer, versus a traditional buyer, who would spend seven weeks with a Realtor before making an offer.
Based on that stat, making something less than a 6% commission might be acceptable if you only need to spend 27% as much time with a client.
In either case, you better be (or become) a real estate stand out in your area.
I used "zillow" to see my condos value and it was overvalued by about 200,000. My daughter tried it and her house was way over valued, too. I'm not impressed with zillow.
if you checked out Zillow, check out HomePriceMaps.com
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