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.
Zillow - www.zillow.com - site info
