Zillow.com™ Launches Home Q&A
“Ask Questions, Share Answers”at the heart of numerous new features harnessing knowledge of agents, homeowners and neighbors
Seattle — April 4, 2007 — Real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced the launch of Zillow™ Home Q&A, among other new features aimed at further opening the site up to community contributions. Home Q&A is the ability for anyone to ask questions and share information and insight about more than 70 million U.S. homes.
“The release of Zillow Home Q&A enables anyone to ask any question about any house for the Zillow community to answer,” said Rich Barton, Zillow CEO. “This is the next step in our quest to help make everyone smarter about real estate. A quest that began with publishing Zestimate™ values last year as a starting point to answer the critical question, ‘How much is this home worth?’ Since then, we have enabled homeowners and agents to update home facts, post homes for sale, and set their Make Me Move™ prices. Over half a million people have made these contributions so far, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface in helping people get answers to critical real estate questions.”
Visitors to Zillow.com can now “ask a question” or “answer a question” about millions of homes, right on that home’s Zillow Web page. Anyone can rate answers as “helpful” or “not helpful,” and each contribution links back to a user’s profile page — telling visitors, for example, if the question was answered by a local agent or other real estate professional, or if the contributor frequently answers questions within the Zillow community.
“Today, some of the most colorful and important information about homes and real estate is trapped inside the heads of local experts — agents, homeowners and neighbors,” said Lloyd Frink, Zillow president. “By allowing people to freely ask questions and share information online about homes, we hope to unlock, for the community as a whole, a powerful vault of data — such as an agent sharing insight into a neighborhood, or a potential buyer asking the shortest commute route downtown.”
In addition to Home Q&A, other new features announced today include:
- Anyone — agent, homeowner, buyer — can create free profile pages with photos, narratives or contact information. All site contribution links back to the user’s profile page.
- Anyone can now indicate whether a home is for sale and at what price. Prominent space on the page is reserved for homeowners and listing agents who might subsequently enter information on that home.
- Anyone can now add an unlimited number of photos to any home’s Web page — for example, historical photos of homes, before-and-after shots, or neighborhood photos.
- Additionally, today marks the launch of Zillow EZ Ads, a self-service, low-cost and geographically-targeted way for agents, other professionals and home sellers to buy ads on Zillow map pages for specific ZIP code searches. The ads take a few minutes to create and can be bought easily with a credit card. EZ Ads can link to profile pages, homes for sale on Zillow or outside Web sites.
More than 150,000 real estate agents currently visit Zillow.com each month; these professionals have some of the most useful knowledge to share with the Zillow community. With many of these new features, Zillow is now providing a free platform for these professionals to answer questions and contribute to conversations, interacting with the millions of buyers and sellers who visit site. All contributions — whether Q&A, a wiki edit to the Real Estate Guide, home posted for sale or EZ Ad — can link back to a professional’s Zillow profile page.
In addition to community ratings of answers, any content on Zillow.com can be flagged for review by Zillow’s customer service team. Contributions deemed not constructive or off-topic will be removed.
One of the most-visited U.S. real estate sites on the Web, Zillow attracted more than four million unique visitors in February 2007, just one year after the site’s launch. Nearly 90 percent of Zillow visitors own a home, and half (54 percent) plan to buy or sell in next two years. Zillow’s growing database has data and Zestimate values on more than 70 million U.S. homes. Other community features previously launched include the ability for homeowners to update and edit information on their home, and post an owner’s estimate. Since this feature launched in fall 2006, more than 600,000 homeowners have updated their home information.
BloodhoundBlog features extensive coverage of tonight’s announcement from Zillow.com:
- A broad overview of the new functionality and its implications (this post)
- Zillow.com’s press release announcing the new software release (this post)
- A podcast with Director of Community Relations David Gibbons
BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will also be covering the story at these sites:
BloodhoundBlog has published more about Zillow.com than any other weblog or publication.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Ashley says:
Seems as though Zillow is definitely stepping things up a notch – from this description of the new features, it sounds like they’re starting to see the usefulness of social media sites – this sounds vaguely like how Digg.com and similar sites are set up.
Good for Zillow, b/c as much as people seem to be talking about it, I don’t think that their “Zestimates” of homes are even close to accurate more than 10% of the time (I’ll admit, I could be way off with that guess).
At least now they have a lot more to offer visitors. To be honest, I still think the best way to get an accurate home value is to go through an appraiser or real estate professional – the way you can through sites like http://www.GetMyHomesValue.com – that way a homeowner can determine what their home really IS worth were they to list the property. Even if you’re not looking for an agent at the time of getting your home’s value, at least you have a connection in the biz thanks to that (nothing wrong with taking advantage of free services). On the flip side for the real estate agents, that’s one more potential client for you! (even if it’s 3 years down the line, you still get a jump on the competition by helping the homeowner out first.)
April 9, 2007 — 10:47 am