Fun with Zillow — #4 — Exploring Zillow’s new features

September 20, 2006

Hats off to the Zillow team for adding some ridiculously “z-addictive” features to their offering! The real estate blogosphere is abuzz with comments, some relatively positive and some negative.In this post, I’ll describe what I found, and in the next one, I’ll provide some commentary on what impact I think these features will have on the agent community and the general public.

While you can continue to use Zillow as before without registering, you do need to get a Zillow account before you can use some of these new features. Once you’ve done so, you search for a property…

…and click on “See home details” which gives you, uh, the home details…

…and three options.
“Save Favorite to My Zillow” is pretty tame. The other two options, however, have a lot of folks hot and bothered. Let’s see what the fuss is about…

“Owner Tools” gives you three further options:

Confirming ownership sounds a bit dubious at first, and indeed the first time you do it you only have to confirm the owner’s name:

Thankfully, to claim a second or subsequent property as your own, you have to enter your credit card information (which Zillow dutifully promises not to use for spurious purposes), enabling them to match their ownership records with the name associated with your credit card.On to the next feature…editing your home facts. They’ve made this ridulously easy to do. In my case, the basic features of the home were correct, but Zillow was missing information about the type of heating and cooling system, the roof type, and a few other items.

The third feature, “Create an Estimate and Make it Public” was also pretty straighforward. You start by editing basic home facts, if necessary……followed by adding home improvements……and other features… …and finally by specifying which comps make the most sense for your home:

When you’re all done, you get an updated personalized estimate, which is different from the public Zestimate.

Go ahead, give it a spin yourself! Warning — it is addictive.

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Written by Kevin · Filed Under For buyers, For sellers, Fun with Zillow, Real estate, Real estate 2.0, Real estate data, Technology, Zillow 

Comments

2 Responses to “Fun with Zillow — #4 — Exploring Zillow’s new features”

  1. jf.sellsius on October 8th, 2006 6:38 am

    The Law of Unintended Consequences:

    I would add that the owner may want to wait to upgrade their property or raise the value until they are about to sell. The reason is the tax man. He may reward your efforts with a nice new tax bill. Read the Seattle PI article below:
    http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/285883_zillow21.html

  2. Broker Price Opinion on December 24th, 2007 5:00 am

    Zillow is still just a tool for sellers in the beginning of the sales process eventually most sellers will hire a pro.

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