Zillow.com launch
Wow, I bet heads are rolling somewhere in Seattle today. Zillow.com launched today (more here), complete with $32 million and 75 employees, and what do we get for that? A nice big outage message. I’ll say it again, wow! $32 million and you can’t run a load test?
Zillow promises to be able value your home for you, which is an interesting idea. I’m in the middle of buying and selling a house so I was really excited to try it out. I managed to get in to value my house and Zillow valued it about 10% under what we just sold it for. But, considering the market these days, I don’t think that’s too terrible. With the lack of comps for our neighborhood, I doubt an agent would have done much better (we sold by owner). I didn’t get a chance to value the house I’m buying, but hopefully will soon, if they can come back online.
I will definitely keep an eye on it, though, because this would be a great tool for NetworthIQ users to be able to value their real estate. I wonder if Zillow will have an API at some point we could tie into?
Update
It’s back up now. The house we’re buying comes up less than 1% under what we paid. Not bad. According to Zillow we’re selling for 10% more than our house is worth and buying for 1% more than the house is worth. Aren’t we the dealmakers 
(of course it never feels like it when you’re paying as much as houses cost these days)
Tags: zillow
AdamD said,
February 8, 2006 @ 9:33 am
At least they wrote a cute haiku message about the outage:
A great site has stalled
Zillow sighs with frustration
Please come back later
I was able to see it last night, before the rush brought it down. Looks pretty snazzy.
Ryan said,
February 8, 2006 @ 11:23 am
Indeed, give them some credit for being transparent and making light of the situation. I’m sure they’ll recover in time, and I agree, the glimpse I caught did look pretty cool.
Michael Khan said,
February 19, 2006 @ 1:02 am
I’d be curious to know what the appraisers said the houses were worth. After all they’re the ones the lenders listen to.
Ryan said,
February 19, 2006 @ 8:55 pm
Don’t you mean the appraisers are the ones who listen to the lenders? “Hey, these people want to spend this much on this house, so make sure the appraisal is for that much. Who cares if it’s not worth that much, we have to hit our numbers.” Only kidding. That never happens, I’m sure.
We’re still a month away from close, so it’s too early for that at this point. I’ll update when we get those numbers back. Should be within the next couple weeks.
Web Things Considered » Random Thoughts said,
February 19, 2006 @ 9:23 pm
[...] Thought #1 Dang, Zillow.com (previously discussed here) sure shot to the top. Have you seen their numbers? I’m impressed. Looks like they came through that inital rough patch with barely a scratch. I hear about them everywhere it seems. Newspaper, local news, co-workers, in-laws. I’ll have more to say about the response to Zillow.com in the real estate community in a future post. [...]
HomePriceMaps said,
March 13, 2006 @ 11:10 am
I like to use http://www.HomePriceMaps.com because they show how much homes were SOLD for using the google mapping technology.
also-if you don’t see HomePriceMaps for your area, simply email them your address and or zip and they’ll update the site within a day or two and send you a follow-up email.