The man who single handedly whipped the travel-agency business into submission is taking on the well established real estate industry.Richard Barton, 38, co-founder of the Expedia.com self-serve travel Web site has just launched a real estate Web site called Zillow. Zillow is a home-valuation tool that spits out "comps," or comparable market analyses, for buyers and sellers who want to know the worth of their homes--or their neighbors' homes.
The response? Overwhelming. 300,000 page views in the first seven hours. The site combines satellite and traditional mapping with transaction data from county governments to create a "Zestimate"--a home's purported value, mapped side-by-side with neighbors' homes. Users can enter data about their homes' improvements--remodeled kitchen, finished basement, etc.--to get a more refined guess.
It is still very much in development - I found only "tax valuations" instead of the promised "Zestimate" but I have no doubt that more data is on the way. They already have a very impressive database of 60 million homes. That's 2 terabytes--2 trillion bytes--of information.
Is that bad news for realtors? It could be - I think we all know the days of an easy 6% commission are fast slipping away.
Is it good news for realtors? It could be. The California Association of Realtors has done a study [that said that] somebody using the Internet in the transaction spent 1.94 weeks with an agent before making an offer, versus a traditional buyer, who would spend seven weeks with a Realtor before making an offer.
Based on that stat, making something less than a 6% commission might be acceptable if you only need to spend 27% as much time with a client.
In either case, you better be (or become) a real estate stand out in your area.
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Tags real estate, realtor, zillow
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