Google Base in Real Estate search results.

I just spotted Google Base search refinements in few of the searches related to real estate. If you look for "home for sale" or "for rent homes" etc, you'll get that refinement page.

Searching for similar experience I found this blog from SearchEngineJournal.

Google MBD?

There's a whole lot of commotion about this new addition to Google's robots.txt file.
Everyone is making their guess about what it could be.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/index.php?p=137

I wonder what it is...

Why is Zillow skewed?

Since my last post, Zillow has improved a bit in terms of showing the near ok valuation for some properties, but for others, it's way off.

Here's why? It seems like it relies a lot on the last sale of the property instead of anything else. If a propertay hasn't been sold in last 2-4 years, its value is going to be very low in Zillow, while if you compare a similar property which has sold recently, Zillow's estimate will come out to be slightly more than the sale value taking in the account that real estates would generally go up....

Lot of people are now starting to rely on this information, but they don't quite understand that zillow's estimates could be way off.

A recent example is Belltown, Seattle. I'm trying to sell my condo which I've had for 2.5 years. Zillow shows a value of this place to be $488k. While other properties which were sold in last 6 months, zillow's estimate is higher than the sale price.

Now consider the units which are on NWMLS for sale, and aren't sold yet. One unit is listed at $550k while it's zillow valuation is $429k. The other one is listed for $760k and it's Z-value is $641k. Considering that most of the units are sold within 97%-100% of their sale price, this is totally wrong.

Preview Local Live

This is even better. You could either pick a car or just walk on a street and you'll see the real world as a driver or a person taking a stroll.

Windows Live Local

seems like a good combination of google local, a9 maps and Blockview. And, the BirdsEye view is phenomenal. Although, its available only for major cities, but others are coming soon.

http://local.live.com/

Origami Project

I wonder if Microsoft's Origami has anything to do with mobile or some kind of a personal electronic device.