How Zillow suckered the entire real estate industry

Before the Zillow launch, there was tremendous speculation what this new company would do to the real estate industry. When Zillow finally went live, their servers crashed as a curious and fearful industry wanted to know whether their online Zestimate tool really worked.

After 15 months, most of us felt vindicated. See, they can't accurately appraise the value of property online. You need to see the property in person! In fact, as recently as last month, I wrote an article complaining about the fact that their Zestimates were still off because they were comping 4,500-square-foot houses with houses that were 1,500 square feet.

Even after meeting with two members of the Zillow team who explained their goal of creating a Web site for every property in the country, I still didn't get it.

Well, stupid me, what a sucker I was!

At NAR's Midyear conference on Friday, Saul Klein said he has seen what has been in front of us since the inception of Zillow. Accoding to Klein, "Zillow is a property wiki." Zestimates are the "stem" (a Wiki term that refers to what you want to define) that gets us all to their site. Over time, users will fill in information about their properties and their neighborhoods. They will record what they paid for their property or their agents will. Imagine what a rich resource this will be, filled with user generated content not only about the price, but about the lifestyle in each area. Imagine hundreds of pictures and videos posted of not only a particular property, but of the neighborhood, recreational, and cultural events.

So, hats off to Zillow. Not only is your traffic close to surpassing that of Realtor.com, you have forced them and a host of companies to disclose comparable sales. While the industry is still moaning about transparency, you've created what may be the single most important property resource for consumers five years from now. Thanks also to Saul Klein for having the wisdom to spot what was really happening. I just can't believe it took 15 months for the rest of us to figure it out.

--Bernice Ross, RealEstateCoach.com and LuxuryClues.com

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