Zillow Podcast with Nubricks
In Nubricks Overseas Property Podcast 21, our final podcast for 2006, Adam Samuel is joined in cyberspace by Amy Bohutinsky, the Director of Communications for Zillow.com, a real estate website which is empowering US home buyers and sellers and is transforming the real estate business as we know it.
The way we search for property is changing on a daily basis with new tools and information to make the process easier and faster for the consumer. Since early 2006, Zillow.com has grown from strength to strength utilising up to 10 years of historical housing data to empower Americans to make informed decisions about buying a home by profiling the sales history of their own and surrounding homes and future real estate purchases.
The founders of Zillow have already had a history of market revolution by changing the way we buy travel in form of Expedia.com. Post Expedia and in the process of buying homes in the Seattle area, Lloyd Fink and Richard Barton whilst doing their own property research found that there was a real gap in the market places to offer real estate consumers in-depth buying information about homes in the US.
Company spokesperson Amy Bohutinsky explains Zillow’s aim is to build a web page for every home in America containing a wealth of historical, financial and descriptive property information, designed to assist the average US home buyer and is driven by the overriding consumer need to value their homes worth in past, present and future.
Zillow currently displays information for about 70 million homes out of a calculated 85 million single family homes in US. Amy goes on to explain that Zillow is trying to make real estate investors smarter by giving them more information, including data that only large institutions were previously able to access. Zillow acknowledges that most people will still use a real estate broker or estate agent as they are known here in the UK, for their local knowledge and to oversee the transaction for them. However, rather than relying on a single not necessarily independent information source Zillow users will be better informed when making their home buying decision, perhaps the greatest ever asset purchase in their lifetime.
Earlier this month Zillow took the bold step of allowing both real estate agents and homeowners to add/modify the details of homes for sale layered on top of existing numerical data. In addition ‘Make Me Move’ is an interesting property market twist whereby homeowners can anonymously post an offer price that just might “make me move” and moves Zillow into the realms of social networking space.
There are many that will say Zillow is just another real estate listings website but to give you the low down on some of Zillow’s website visitor stats, you can get an idea of what this real estate newcomer is already achieving.
86% of US citizens own a home with 54% set to buy or sell a home now or within the next 2 years.
The information profiles of 30 million homes have been looked up on Zillow.com in the last 10 months and this has been by users physically typing in the address of the home they are looking for data on. Real estate enthusiasts have enticed by heavily marketed devices such as Zillow’s first tool ‘Zestimates’ which we are reminded by Amy are just that, an estimate. Based on an algorithm developed by Zillow, despite a median margin for error of about 7.2% is still an impressive feat when you take into account they haven’t ever visited the home.
Already in the week and a half since its launch on December 6th, 8000 recorded entries have been made for their new “Make Me Move” service, in addition to 11,000 homes for sale being listed.
Without advertising, Zillow currently receives about 3,500,000 monthly website visits, 60% of which are repeat visits from consumers who are actively in the market looking to buy and sell real estate.
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Length: 00:23:15
This is the last in our podcast series for 2006 but rest assured we will be back in 2007 when the Nubricks Property Podcast Series continues with a line up that includes a profile on Morocco property with a leading specialist and we also get the real story on property in Dubai so why not sign up for reminders via our newsletter here.
