I read an article recently about Zillow.com, a startup founded by an ex-Microsoft executive. The basic idea is that their online presence gives you access to home values for properties both on and off the market and doesn't require any sort of fee or even login information.
It's really damned cool.
The screenshot above right is of the Zillow.com view of an intersection just north of the Microsoft campus. Clicking on any property will give you:
- The estimated value
- Square footage
- Taxes paid
- Recent sale information
- Price history (computed every 10 days for up to 10 years)
- and so forth
The service really is remarkable. I understand that they sit on a 2TB database (bigger than Expedia's) that currently covers some 60 megahomes. In a few years they top to hit 110 million.
This is the sort of thing that I've always found ludicrously interesting. I was thinking recently about putting together a snarf utility that would hunt out car values and give a historical view of what cars were worth from the time I started the database...but then I got distracted by something shiny.
Zillow.com actually pulls it off. Bravo.
Heard about this on NPR the other day, and also heard some letters NPR got about it the following day. The other listeners claimed that the property values in the areas they looked (and had owned property in) had home values from the 1970's - and I believe there were other accuracy problems.
Anyhoo, the value of this site seems dependent upon accuracy (or in the least, relative accuracy) of data.
How did the areas you looked at fare?
All the prices I've looked at so far (both here in Seattle as well as New Mexico) has been spot-on. The only funnies I've noticed have been dates of sale—zillow reports a recent date of sale on properties that haven't been sold for years.
No Los Alamos! I hope they get some of the smaller rural areas soon.