Zillow is making a impact
I went to my bank the other day to do some stuff with a loan for a house that I am thinking about buying. While going over all of the information, the loan officer asked the usual questions including, what’s the asking price and how much the house will appraise for. To my surprise, she checked Zillow.com to get a idea of how much the house would appraise for. This was a big bank (WAMU), and I would assume that they had a private label program for checking comps. But, nope, they used Zillow. I guess Zillow is doing something right.
By the way, Zillow.com added “Brids Eye†views, via Microsoft Virtual Earth. So, now you can get 3D views of homes in selected cities. Cool stuff.
technorati tags: real estate, zillow.com, local.live.com/
Zillow is very interesting. The CEO of TagWorld beat you to it though….he has an entry on his TagWorld page from Apr 13th about Zillow. It uses the aerial photo of (supposedly) Brittney Spears house that has a price of near $6 mil as an example.
Only caveat about this kind of info online is the dubious accuracy of the numbers. Most likely the data is from tax rolls which may or may not be up-to-date and which seldom reflect the true market value of homes, and oft times, not even an accurate square footage. As a general indicator of lot size and price range for an area, a service like Zillow can be a great guide though.