June 15 , 2006. The latest “hot new thing” on the Web answers everyone’s No. 1 question about real estate: “How much is this house really worth?” Just type a street address into Zillow.com, and you will get an instant estimate of the current market value
of your – or your neighbor’s – house. You’ll also see a bird’s-eye view of the property, taken from satellite images, and you can learn the estimated value of nearby homes.

Aside from appealing to one’s natural curiosity about a major personal asset – and voyeurism about other people’s assets – Zillow.com also provides valuable information to community-based organizations in their dealings with other real estate professionals.

“There’s an enormous amount of public information about homes in the United States,
but most of it is locked up in the county courthouse and is not easy to access,” says Amy Bohutinsky, Director of Communications at Zillow.com. “By making it available for free, Zillow.com helps people become smarter, more empowered consumers.” In addition to compiling the data, the company also applies mathematical formulas to arrive at its
figures.

Community development organizations can use Zillow.com to see estimated values for a single property or for all the properties in a block or a neighborhood. Zillow.com might help them spot potential bargains to acquire, or provide information as leverage in negotiating with sellers. Recent sales prices and sale dates are included in the data.

The property value delivered by Zillow.com is only an estimate – a “Zestimate” in Zillow.com-speak – and the accuracy depends on the quantity and quality of data gathered from county records. These vary, and Zillow.com offers guidelines for weighing  the likely accuracy of estimates for a city or state. Zillow.com also gives you a chance to refine the estimate, based on what you know about the house, or to project what its value might be after major or minor improvements. The company cautions, however, that its estimates do not replace professional appraisals.

The site contains estimates for 46 million homes so far. If yours is not among them, don’t worry – Zillow.com is just getting started. Launched in February 2006, it is actually still in “beta test” mode. But when user demand on the first day reaches two million pages – enough to crash the site temporarily – you can safely say the test is going very, very well. It will be “many months” before the site emerges from its beta test, Bohutinsky said.

The start-up is the brainchild of Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, who previously founded Expedia.com, a successful travel information site.