Let me know if this sounds familiar.
This is a great neighborhood – I wonder if we can afford it?
Maybe we should move to Nebraska. I think the housing prices are much more affordable.
I remember growing up in Massachusetts. I wonder what the neighborhood looks like now and what the houses are worth?
That is a beautiful house – I wonder who lives there and how much it’s worth?
Hey Honey, can you believe that Bill and Sally are moving? Maybe we should consider it. How much do you think our house is worth?
I think most people want to know the value of their house, and if pressed would probably admit they would want to know the value of other people’s homes as well. I know a fair number of people who are curious. Maybe they are being smart and just want to have information that can help them decide when it’s the right time to move.
This website can answer any questions you have about the value of your house and a neighborhood.
I wish I had known about this when I was looking for a house in the Dallas area. It is a very good tool for evaluating neighborhoods, a specific house and it does a nice job with an aerial view. Basically what happens is you enter an address of a home and within a few seconds you will have a view of that house and the neighborhood – with all the pricing information. In addition, you can scroll in any direction and new homes and prices come up as you move your mouse.
This is a great tool that has information updated every month and will tell you if your home has gone up or down in the past 30 days.
I look forward to hearing your comments and thoughts after you have used the site.
Paul Kirch says:
Zillow is a cool site, though it doesn’t really provide accurate comparables. I just sold my house in Seattle, WA and when I looked on Zillow it was comparing low-end builders in addition to all of the other homes such as mine which was actually built by a very high-end builder. It showed a price range lower than what the market actually was bearing for a house like mine. In fact, I sold my home for sufficiently more than Zillow showed. That being said, it was a great tool to show the area and to get an idea of pricing since, as you eluded, it showed the prices of neighboring homes. Going back to the issue of the comparable pricing, it also showed far too large of an area to be accurate. If you could narrow down by neighborhood or other criteria, the tool would be much more powerful. It is a great tool for a lot of things, but I got more value from the MLS listings and from my Realtor.
Brian Ottum says:
Zillow does a great job of estimating the value of homes. But, like market research, the quality of the result is dependent on the quality of the underlying data. Zillow gets good data from my region.
I’ve sold two houses myself and recommend that others do the same. Real estate brokers seldom earn their excessive commissions. Zillow and the like will help FSBO’s gain in power.
Carrie B. says:
My husband and I recently purchased our first home and used Zillow just to get some rough estimates of home values. We actually found a different site – http://www.trulia.com – to be even more useful, as it provides a great deal of information on neighborhoods, comps, etc. Also, http://www.neighboroo.com is an interesting resource that a colleague passed along to us as a source of interesting (if not terribly granular) neighborhood statistics. Happy hunting!
Patrick Glaser says:
The survey dork in me can see data mining potential for this site (as long as you know the respondent’s address).
By itself, you could estimate some interesting things- property tax burden (for example). But, connected with other variables- you might get some really unique measures- income vs wealth vs. behaviors (etc.).
After all, wouldn’t property be at least one measure of wealth? Food for thought.