zillow

"Things are very good at Zillow," Rich Barton, CEO of the online real estate company, was telling me. We're in the thick of the worst economic crisis of a generation and a depressed real estate market, so this means that Barton is either a very clever CEO or an audacious liar. I was at first inclined to believe the latter, but left the interview convinced of the former. He's a canny Web entrepreneur.

It hasn't all been smooth sailing for Zillow. In October, Barton laid off about 25 percent of Zillow's staff. He said he did it because he "couldn't forecast" his business and had to assume the worst scenario. However, the trough following the 2008 bust ended up not being as bad as he thought it was going to be for Zillow, and the company is now back up to its October 2008 staffing level of about 130 people.

Zillow is currently growing, but in a different way than it was before. Page views and unique visitors are up. The site had 8.8 million unique visitors in March, which is a 70 percent year-over-year growth. Zillow has the twice the users at this point as Barton's team originally projected. However, the revenue per unique user is down to a third of what he expected it would be.

There was, of course, a fundamental shift in user behavior after the bust. But it wasn't all bad. Buying activity on Zillow went down, though site traffic went up. As Barton says, "Buyers are on the sidelines, but not passively." They're monitoring the market, he says, looking for the time to jump in, to either buy or sell. Like the Zillow site itself, physical open houses are crowded, he says. The browsing activity doesn't get reflected in home transaction data. Neither sales volumes nor prices are going up, even if people are circling open houses and online real estate sites like buzzards.

Until the market becomes a place where buyers and sellers want to engage again, they continue to gather information. So Barton continues to sell advertising and new data services.

I told Barton I thought Zillow was "real estate porn." Barton accepts this--his business at the moment is based on it--and says simply, "there's a practicality to real estate porn. People are dreaming about their next home. That's positive. They're planning."

Barton is making access to that real estate porn easier. A new iPhone app shows you the Zillow price estimate ("Zestimate") of homes as you walk or drive by them, and Barton says 10 percent to 20 percent of the site's queries are coming from the iPhone app, which was downloaded 234,000 times in its first 12 days of release.

Barton says two-thirds of the site's users are in the market right now, though when he says "in the market" he means waiting for the market to look good enough to buy or sell. He says 21.9 percent of the homeowners on Zillow are underwater on their homes (they owe more on the mortgage than the home is currently worth), and that the overall Zillow home value index "is in freefall, down 14 percent year over year." There are, he says, very few markets where the acceleration of the housing price decline is slowing--but those are mostly the markets that got hit the worst first, such as Los Angeles and Modesto, Calif.

But listing homes in foreclosure on Zillow is a growth business. "They advertise!" Barton says. … Read more

LoanMarket.net announced on Monday that it has launched its online marketplace for buying and selling mortgages.

According to the company, its service allows both buyers and sellers to come together in a "neutral, open marketplace" to trade mortgages and other real-estate secured note investments.

The site has a variety of sellers, including mortgage originators, banks, and lending institutions, mortgage pool investors, small private investors, and seller carry-back note holders. All the notes listed on the site include current market value information, as well as a photo of the property taken within 14 days of the post. All … Read more

Last week, I looked at five real estate search sites and discussed their merits as tools for searching for a home. So now that you have that dream house picked out, it's time you get down to the business of finding a real estate agent and researching both the home itself, and the neighborhood it's in--just to make sure it's still a place you want to live.

After all, moving to a new home can't be as simple as finding a home you like and buying it immediately, right?

Find your real estate agent with DoorFly Once you've found the home you like on sites like Trulia or Realtor.com, you have to find a real estate agent to help you look at homes, secure the best deal, and get you into your new abode. But finding the best real estate agent isn't always easy.

That's where DoorFly comes in. Instead of calling different real estate firms to find the best agent, you can use DoorFly to explain your needs and watch as real estate agents bid to work with you.

When you first sign up for DoorFly, you're asked to provide the area where you'd like to live, your home-buying needs, an affordable price you're willing to pay, and desired home features. That information is then posted on the site and will be viewed by real estate agents who also signed up. Interested agents will contact you and inform you of their knowledge and experience. But here's the kicker--they will also offer an incentive rebate from their commission at closing to sweeten the pot. I found that sometimes that discount is 5 percent of their fee, but it can be up to 20 percent off, depending on the market. Either way, it's a great way to save some money.

As interesting and useful as DoorFly can be, I was disappointed with its general lack of support. Granted, it's a start-up that few people have heard about, but so far, the site only has real estate agents from Indiana, Missouri, Texas, and North Carolina using the site. That's obviously an issue for those who wish to move elsewhere in the U.S. and one that DoorFly can hopefully address at some point in the future.

DoorFly is a compelling and unique service, and you should look at if you want to buy a home in one of those locations. It's easy to use, the real estate agents offer good deals, and generally, they seem to be knowledgeable.

Research mortgages and neighborhoods with HomeThinking HomeThinking is designed quite well. When you're brought to the main page, you can quickly and easily find a real estate agent in any of the 50 U.S. states, perform research on mortgages in cities and towns across the country, or gain knowledge about different neighborhoods in major markets. It's a great resource if you're unsure whether you want to move to a specific location.

When I started evaluating HomeThinking, I first looked for a real estate agent in both big cities like New York and San Francisco, as well as small suburbs in my area. In all cases, the site returned a slew of real estate agents from companies both big and small. It was outstanding.

HomeThinking's neighborhood search is also a great feature that allows you to compare big cities, as well as mid-level markets like Akron, Ohio. When you perform a comparison, the site delivers a slew of results that examine which areas of the new city resemble your current city, as well as reviews by those who live there.

For example, HomeThinking claims that those living in the Castro-Upper Market area of San Francisco will find a similar lifestyle in New York City's West Village. It's a nice feature, but it would have been nice if more information was available. Simply telling me where to move if I like the scene I live in now won't help all that much.

But HomeThinking's best feature is its mortgage resource page, which takes an in-depth look into everything you ever wanted to know about mortgages in the location to which you're planning to move. Whether you're researching suburbs or big cities, the site will deliver the risk of a sub-prime mortgage crisis, leading lenders in the area, the average loan size, number of rejected applications, and much more. It even shows a heat map detailing where the majority of people are trying to buy homes. HomeThinking's mortgage research tool is best I've seen.… Read more

Real-estate sites had some tough times last week. First, Redfin, an online brokerage for residential real estate, announced that it was laying off 20 percent of its staff, then Zillow, a service that delivers home values and lists sales, announced that it was forced to lay off 25 percent of its workforce.

But Trulia, which lets buyers find homes for sale across the United States, says it has no layoff plans and that it has enjoyed so much growth, it's actually looking to expand.

"We are not making any layoffs. All companies need to be smart in this … Read more

Zillow, the online resource to find out how much your home is worth, announced that it has laid off 25 percent of its workforce to prepare for what it expects will be an extremely severe economic environment.

"This week we are reducing our workforce by 25 percent, Rich Barton, Zillow's CEO said in a blog post. "This was an incredibly painful decision for me and the leadership team, but, in the end, we concluded that we had no choice but to securely batten down the hatches as we sail into a major economic storm.

"The unprecedented … Read more

Zillow.com, which in November 2007 teamed up with a consortium of newspapers to carry their listings on its real-estate site, has now expanded that deal to include the sale of ads on each other's sites.

Under the Zillow Advertising Network agreement, the consortium's advertisers can tap into Zillow's user base of more than 5 million unique monthly visitors, while Zillow's advertisers will have access to readers of the newspapers' online real-estate content.

The newspaper consortium includes 11 major newspaper companies, including the Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, and E.W. Scripps.

"This partnership allows advertisers … Read more

Zillow is an online house-buying service. Instead of having to go visit houses in person you can do so online, browsing by neighborhood and narrowing down what you're looking for based on a variety of parameters. It'll do some of the legwork for you by figuring out how your house stacks up against other houses in the area, including how much it is per square foot and how much other houses sold for that were in your area.

One of the neatest features, however, is the option to ask a question to the sellers or the real estate … Read more

Zillow (previous coverage), a site for home buyers, sellers, and lookie-loos, is getting a broader focus today: on neighborhoods, not just houses. As such, it could become a resource for people neither selling or buying, but rather just living.

Neighborhoods now have their own pages, which include demographic info (I'm surrounded by lawyers who ride motorcycles, apparently) listings of homes for sale, and community features. There are discussion boards and neighbor directories, which could, theoretically, make Zillow a useful resource for people who live there. I'd find it useful, for example, if there was an active discussion board … Read more