Zillow opens up Q&A on every home

April 4, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

zillow3.gifReal estate Web site Zillow.com continues to show momentum.

The Seattle company has released a new feature called Home Q&A, letting people ask questions and get answers about each of more than 70 million U.S. homes. Zillow demonstrated the feature to VentureBeat two weeks ago. If Zillow can leverage the traffic it is getting from its controversial home price estimates — and signs are that its traffic is robust and growing (see Hitwise rankings in spreadsheet below) — and thereby get enough people to make these Q&As lively, it could be a breakthrough feature.

This appears to be a swift competitive response to My Currency, a younger company that relies on user-generated commentary about home prices, and which needs a new URL if anyone is going to find it.

If you’re a home buyer and see a quirky listing — the house may have been listed for a long time, whatever — you can ask a question about the house and get feedback (hopefully, people will respond; agents will have the most reason to do so, because they know the most, and because their comments will include a link back to their own profile page at Zillow, so that they can get leads.)

If you’re curious about the neighborhood or commute patterns, you can ask about these too. Zillow has introduced a host of other features around this. You can load historical photos of the homes, for example. Anyone can rate answers as “helpful” or “not helpful,” and Zillow has hired people to troll the site to remove spam from agents or others. (See screenshot below).

The feature follows Zillow’s move to enabled homeowners and agents to update home facts, and post homes for sale. There’s also a notable “Make Me Move” feature, where an owner who is not otherwise interested in selling can list the price of an offer so enticing that they couldn’t resist taking it anyway.

Zillow has also introduced an advertising feature, which lets agents, professionals and others take out geographically targeted ads, which get listed on pages people get when they search for homes on Zillow.

The year-old Zillow says it attracted more than four million unique visitors in February.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Maybe they could work on their price engine first. I'm in the market for a house in the Bay Area and tried to use Zillow but their pricing is all over the map. When the Zillow estimate is 1,000,000 but the sold for price is 100,000, you've either got a bug, bad UI or a bad pricing engine.
  • Frank Joseph
    Gale -
    First off you like Zillow. I get to ask some very important questions. When I look up a home and find it sold for 189K in 1997 and now its on the market for 660K... I ask is this price justified. The sales history is very justified. I ignore its estimates which are meaningless.

    The $100K may be forclosure property.

    Back to my orginal problem with Zestimates... lets face some facts... Zillow needs to add a second price line which is the properties longterm value... base 1997 plus inflation. Over the long run RE only keeps up with inflation. Else its a bubble as we see today in SV RE. If anything, Zillow provides a great website where buyers can clearly see how bubbely our RE market is and how much it will correct. FYI im shooting for 50%...
  • Michel
    I don't think Zillow is trying to fool anyone with the accuracy of their pricing engine. If you read the information about it on their site (here - http://www.zillow.com/howto/DataCoverageZestima...) you'll see that in the markets where they are performing the best, their Zestimates are still only ~75% of the times within 10% of the selling price on properties. On a half-a-million dollar house, that's a 100,000$ range. It bears to ask, do you have to be a real estate genius to guess the value of a house +/- 50,000$ if the house sale price turns out to be 500,000$?

    Having said this, I think their RE tools are fantastic and if you claim your house, update your house facts, hand pick the comps and basically feed more & better data to Zillow, then it definitely lets you do something that there was no way for normal people (like me!) to do easily before they came around.

    50% RE correction... You'd have to be in a very, very unlucky market where most people were sub-prime borrowers and they all happened to foreclose around the same time! Won't happen in my market but maybe in yours?
  • visit
    We loved the site, really loved it!