VentureBeat

Zillow, the controversial website that gives value estimates of people’s homes and other real estate info, has raised a significant $30 million of funding, despite the mortgage industry credit crunch.

The Seattle company has now raised a hefty $87 million in total funding during its short lifetime, making it one of the most richly backed of the new era of “Web 2.0″ Internet companies.

The round was led by Legg Mason Capital Management. Previous backers Benchmark Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures and PAR Capital all participated.

Opened in early 2005 by the founders of Expedia, Zillow started out as a portal for information about homes around the country. Over time, it has added on sales components for owners and real estate agents, and also provides a place for buyers to discuss or ask questions about a property.

Only last month, we reported that competitor site Redfin had landed $12 million in funding, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Trulia, the other main player in the Web 2.0 real estate space, pulled in $10 million in May. Terabitz, started by a teenager, raised $10 million in July (our coverage).

Asked whether this most recent funding round has anything to do with the real estate slowdown, chief financial officer Spencer Rascoff told me that there was no relation. Rather, it had to do with the company’s focus on employing plenty of skilled developers and improving the site.

The country’s real estate troubles may indirectly benefit the Zillow, though; real estate agents desperate to sell homes are far more likely to post their offerings online, sacrificing some control in exchange for having more people see their properties.

Since Zillow introducing them last year, home listings grown impressively, going from a couple of thousand at the end of 2006 to nearly 300,000 at present. About 85 percent of the listings are posted by real estate agents, and the remainder by home owners.

The other half of Zillow’s business, ad revenue from its website, doesn’t seem to be growing nearly as fast. In February, the site received 4 million unique visitors; by August, that number had grown to 4.4 million. Rascoff said that the site had lost some “voyeuristic viewers” who stopped ogling homes on the site as the real estate bubble deflated, and are gradually being replaced by confused buyers and sellers looking for solid information.

The company’s strategy going forward is to add more features for users to talk about specific properties. Another initiative, a service called EZAd, seeks to capture part of the local ad market by selling ads in areas; a plumber in Manhattan, for example, could pay $10 for a thousand viewers who entered one of the district’s zip codes to see his ad.

Currently staffed by 155 people, some 100 of which are developers, Zillow will add on about two dozen more people during the next year. It has no plans to take further funding.

Terabitz is launching a comprehensive site for home buyers wanting to organizing and map information about their prospective homes.

Think of it as a cross between a personal homepage (like iGoogle or Netvibes, for example) and a real estate information site (like Trulia or Zillow).

You can drag and drop housing information from menu bars into a central dashboard with a set of data displays. With one click, you can map this data using the site’s Google Maps mashup.

Besides for-sale listings, there’s information like average local mortgage rates, average rental fees and other real estate information.

You can also find out all sorts of good things about a place that are harder to quantify, like nearby restaurants, libraries, schools, coffee shops. Even the FBI’s crime — and specifically sex offender — database gets included.

This non real estate data is what sets Terabitz, of Palo Alto, Calif. apart from sites like Zillow and Trulia, which also offer home profile pages that are limited mainly to real estate data.

You can customize your own page of data widgets about your prospective home. You can also make an image of your data collection and share it with other users or email to friends.

People want to do deep research about where they might be living, said chief executive Ashfaq Munshi. They want to do more than focus narrowly on the price of real estate, he said. The process may take as long as 18 months for some people. Terabitz is trying to put it all together

Munshi says his family has been through the home-buying and selling process a few times. In fact, his 17 year old son, Kamran, thought of the idea two years ago, after seeing Zillow and thinking he could do better.

The company uses a variety of ways to collect data, from licensing deals with other sites to pulling data directly from web sites. Local Craiglist listings are available through it. It also links to partner sites, including local realtors.

Munshi admitted to us that the space is crowded. His plan is to get out ahead with this launch, and maintain a six to nine month lead over other real estate sites. Notably, Zillow is developing ways to include more community information, as well.

The company hopes to make money by connecting its users with realtors and other local services, charging transaction fees in the process.

Munshi is a veteran Silicon Valley executive, most recently the chief executive of Level 5 Networks. TeraBitz has received $10 million in funding from Tudor Capital, part of the Tudor Hedge Fund Family.