Finally, Zillow launches.

Zillow is doing what Redfin did, but at a larger scale, more IP (Zillow's algorithms) and a lot more features. That makes the site not only more confusing, but unproven algorithms seem to have huge margin of errors. For example, couple of house valuations show that the properties are priced much lower as supposed to the sale prices in the recent history. And, of if you try to update the assessment, it goes way beyond the actual sale price. That's due to variety of reasons including incorrect assessment of the property at the county office to lower taxes, or un-reported upgrades and remodels to the county, or a recent high price sale by a builder in the neighborhood etc.

I've been studying this market for more than couple of years now (see my earlier posts How's internet changing real estate and Real estate traditional scenario). And, Zillow provides a mix of products/features to the consumers. I've also compared buyers and sellers journey in the past and what kind of features would help them. The raw data is already there, though not expeosed well, and sites like Microsoft's houseandhome.com also provides neighborhood info, but consumer need more derived assessments. Although having the ability to slice and dice data in different ways is definitely great, I, as a consumer, need some stencil metrics and standard derived ways to look at the information which make more sense to me as a buyer or a seller or just investor.

If there were some metrics like Zestimate which could tell me how well an area appriases over time and how's the housing ownership and housing age changing with time, that'd help me more than comparing my house value to city, county, state, national average.

All in all, with so much money spent, so many smart poeple at work and after such a long time, I was expecting more.