How do you define a neighborhood? You don’t. How do you obtain neighborhood expertise? Go to neighborhood expert.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m quoting from David Gibbons from Zillow.com. He wrote these remarks in a comment, but I’m pulling them out because it’s an interesting topic: How can web-based vendors build databases of neighborhood expertise?

What you are seeing in the neighborhood space is the lack of any predefined neighborhood database. It’s never been done before and so, while there’s a great place to start when building a taxonomy of regions at any other level, neighborhoods are tough to build.

The 6,500 neighborhoods currently defined on Zillow were done by hand. We’ve talked this through with outside.in – they took the same approach. The solution is to allow homeowners to collaboratively describe their neighborhoods and we’ll iterate towards that but even homeowners seldom agree on neighborhood designations and boundaries. It’s an interesting problem to solve.

That’s what I said. This is me when Zillow 6 was released:

What does all this have to do with Zillow.com?

I think they’ve made a mistake in their approach to community building, a mistake that will prevent a true community from emerging from all their efforts.

As an example, what is a neighborhood? It’s not what Zillow says it is, and it’s not what some city council says it is. A neighborhood is what the neighbors say it is, and, as in my North Central Phoenix neighborhood, neighbors can differ about what the neighborhood really is.

So how should Zillow define the neighborhoods it hopes end-users will create content around?

It shouldn’t. It should let the users define the neighborhoods, and if there are different interpretations of what the neighborhood is, it should allow the proponents of those different ideas to create multiple competing neighborhood descriptions. When one starts to draw all the attention and the other fades away, Zillow can snuff the loser. Until then, the neighborhood advocates will have an investment in creating content for Zillow, and an avid interest in getting their friends to the site to show off what they have created.

In other words, they will have created a virtual analogue of their neighborhood as a means of defining and describing it. This is an atom-sized on-line community, an acorn from which a great oak can grow.

I think Zillow is a self-selected, self-inflicted victim of the apple-polisher syndrome. It is so interested in crafting a definitive experience that it creates a sterile environment, like that massively detailed N-gauge train layout that daddy won’t let the kids play with. Zillow is not selling definitive information, it’s selling infotainment. If its suppose-to-be-fun tools are no damn fun, someone else’s will be.

David again:

Greg – what do you mean by “Neighborhood expertise is detailed perfectly on pp. 5-6 of All Marketers Are Liars”

On-line neighborhood databases are the virtual sex of real estate. This, from Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, is how you get neighborhood information:

Arthur Riolo is a world-class storyteller. Arthur sells real estate in my little town north of New York City. He sells a lot of real estate — more than all his competitors combined. That’s because Arthur doesn’t sell anything.

Anyone can tell you the specs of a house or talk to you about the taxes. But he doesn’t. Instead, Arthur does something very different. He takes you and your spouse for a drive. You drive up and down the hills of a neighborhood as he points out house after house (houses that aren’t for sale). He tells you who lives in that house and what they do and how they found the house and the name of their dog and what their kids are up to and how much they paid. He tells you a story about the different issues in town, the long-simmering rivalries between neighborhoods and the evolution and imminent demise of the Mother’s Club. Then, and only then, does Arthur show you a house.

It might be because of Arthur’s antique pickup truck or the fact that everyone in town knows him or the obvious pleasure he gets from the community, but sooner or later, you’ll buy a house from Arthur. And not just because it’s a good house. Because it’s a good story.

Forget the silly, way-too-large neighborhood definitions, forget the duplication of records, the omissions, the errors. This is what a database can never do.

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