Web Site Lets You See What Your Home -- and Your Neighbor's -- Are Worth
May 13, 2006 — -- In this fast-changing real estate market, you might drive around trying to guess the value of beautiful houses, and you probably wonder, how much is my home worth?
Lloyd Frink's wife saw a house and fell in love with it. It may have been his wife's dream house, but Frink wasn't going to let love get in the way of getting a good deal.
He wanted comparables, sales trends -- all the hard numbers available before dropping a down payment.
"We had been looking for houses for a long time in this neighborhood. I got data from the Internet in terms of some of the recent sales. I put it into a spreadsheet, and I came up with a valuation for the house I was looking to buy, and I said, 'There must be an easier way to do this,'" Frink said.
So because Frink is who he is -- a computer whiz who started interning at Microsoft at age 14, who then went on to make millions in the dot-com boom -- he got into the real estate business and started a Web site called Zillow.com.
Zillow offers free, instant valuations and data on 65 million homes across the country. The site gets its information from public records, tax assessments and comparables from recently sold properties, then mixes it all up using complex algorithms to come up with what they call a "zestimate."
This isn't Frink's first foray into putting do-it-yourself price comparisons on the Internet. Frink and his Zillow co-founder Rich Barton are the guys who turned ordinary travelers into travel agents -- they're the brains behind the online booking site expedia.com.
They figured they could do for home buying what they'd done for travel.
And Zillow has tapped a nerve in the real estate marketplace. Its servers crashed on launch day back in February, under the crush of people curious to know what their home -- not to mention their best friend's and their neighbors' homes -- were worth.
"We think there are two parts to buying a home," Frink said. "One is the very analytical, data-driven side, kind of the facts, which is what we are trying to provide you on Zillow. Then there is the more emotional, qualitative portion of figuring out how much a home is worth and then want[ing] to consult an expert."
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