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July 18, 2006

Finding Home Values in Web Search

With all the recent discussion on where home prices are heading, we saw a great opportunity to improve our home valuation product on Yahoo! Real Estate. We?ve integrated our product with Zillow.com to provide users with free instant home value estimates and comparable home valuations for millions of homes in the U.S.

We also made it very easy to get your estimated home valuation: just go to Yahoo! Search and search for 'home values?. You can then refine your search with a Yahoo! Shortcut by entering any street address and city/state or ZIP to get the estimated value on Yahoo! Real Estate.

The home values page includes a map with your searched home, along with 10 comparables, and has a table showing each home?s Zestimate (estimated home value) and 1 week value change. We?re using Yahoo! Maps which provides satellite imagery in case you want to see what the neighborhood looks like. And we also provide a graph to show historical price trends and a link to Yahoo! Answers so you can ask questions on real estate and home values.

So go check your home?s value (or any home for that matter--your neighbor?s, your boss' ... you get the picture) and let us know what you think.

Fred Bao, Technical Yahoo!
Carlos Teran, Product Manager Yahoo! Real Estate
Yi Zhang, Engineering, Technical Yahoo!

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Comments


I think it is great that you have improved your product. I have found it useful in the past.

I have a small bit of concern wrt to zillow.
I think zillow has a lot of potential, but its data doesn't seem to have "stabilized" yet. I did a lot of poking around with values of homes around the US during the first few months of this year (2006) after zillow.com launched. I noticed a disturbing trend - many homes that I checked had their home values swing dramatically (some lower, some higher) at about the same time as zillow.com went live.

It almost appeared that a bit of quantum physics was occuring - as zillow.com listed prices, they changed by the fact they were being viewed. I'm not concerned about a small change of a few thousand dollars. I noticed in the "history graph"'s that there were changes of 10's of thousands of dollars in the period immediately following zillow.com's launch. That concerned me. And it still does.

As I said, I think it is great that you are partnering with zillow.com. I think that in the internet's "everything-happens-fast" world, you have to partner quick and move quicker. I just hope that you view the data and service provided by zillow.com as not-quite-stable and still in its early stages. It has much room for improvement and will get better as more of us early adopters refer other people to it.

But for now, I advise a bit of caution.

Posted by: _Jon | July 19, 2006 10:14 AM

When I use the search within Yahoo it does not find my house. I get no homes were found at address. Please try another address. If I go to zillow.com it finds my home fine.

Just want to let you know something is not working right.

Tim

Posted by: Tim | July 19, 2006 06:26 PM

I checked out zillow.com before and I also noticed that its estimates have a tendency to be off somewhat. Naturally, it's not going to be as accurate as getting a comparative market analysis.

I'm glad to see this feature on Yahoo! Real Estate though, and I imagine that this signals a facelift similar to Yahoo! Tech, Yahoo! Autos, etc.

Posted by: asurroca | July 19, 2006 07:48 PM

I remain very skeptical.

When Zillow was first available, I wasn't that surprised to see wild variations on the estimates for homes in my neighborhood considering the wide variety of homes. For example, my house is over 125 years old and the house across the street is 2 years old. But the estimates are just as wild now.

Several of the homes, old and new, in the neighborhood don't appear to be in the database. Most of the information on lot size, square feet, and features/rooms for the homes on our block is missing or wrong.

The comps are the most unrealistic item. It's listing 1970's tract housing on postage stamp lots across the highway for almost all the comps for the 100 year old homes on quarter to half acre lots in this neighborhood.

Posted by: anne | July 19, 2006 09:55 PM

Fascinating, of the 6 houses I've lived in, this found not a single one of them. Well, I'm sure it's a really great product...Probably only works with really 'important' places like California or New York.

Posted by: Jones | July 20, 2006 01:47 AM

Very nice, but when I dig into it, it appears that it's all Zillow information. What exactly is Yahoo Real Estate adding other than an easy way to get to the data itself, Fred and group?

Posted by: Dave Taylor | July 21, 2006 09:18 PM

My home, as well as the neighborhood, has been built for almost two years, and it's still shows as acres of dirt lots. No homes or values.
When is Yahoo or Zillow going to update their database???

Posted by: Karen | August 28, 2006 02:35 PM

Good idea. Certainly would also be relevant to international markets...

Posted by: rvakil | September 3, 2006 01:51 AM

I logged on to Zillow.com for the first time today to find out what all the fuss is about. I like the site - it provided information regarding property taxes and actual recent selling prices (as opposed to market asking prices) of comparable properties to provide a starting place for valuing a property. This is the same information I obtained from the County Assessor's site. Although I'm not lauding the site, as an investor I will certainly add it to my toolkit when determining the difference between hard numbers value and market value when making an investment decision.

Posted by: Nancy | November 19, 2006 01:23 PM

This is very useful idea.
It should help in any way, the best one is that it can be expanded in several way to be more useful.
I mean the DB should be updated also.

Posted by: Bulgarian properties | March 14, 2007 04:13 AM