I just visited Zillow. This is the newly-released, much-hyped real estate information site. For those of you familiar with PropertyShark, think of Zillow as a glamorous version. If PropertyShark is New York City streetsense, Zillow comes off as Hollywood glitz.
My thoughts on Zillow:
I heard yesterday there were loading-time issues, but today I found the site loaded quickly for me.
I entered the data on a house I provided financing for last October. I thought this house would be a good candidate for information being up to date as it has been 4+ months since close.
Zillow provided only the tax assessed value on the property. I can get that from the Nassau County assessor’s office directly.
The description of the house was incomplete: Zillow couldn’t say how many bedrooms.
The last sale information posted was from 1992. PropertyShark’s information is superior. For the same house, the recent sale information is 2001 there. Neither site has the sael from October. Nassau County is notoriously slow in recording sale information, deeds, etc. This would explain the lag for PropertyShark. I don’t know why Zillow can’t pull the same info.
My feeling about Zillow: it’s just another internet toy that makes money for the site owner through sales of advertising but provides useless or confusing information to/for the consumer.
PropertyShark comes closer to the “promise” of the internet: free access to basic and useful information. Of course, in the industry, we take anything available on PropertyShark with a “grain of salt.” We have other, more reliable methods of verifying information about properties. For my part, I check with our appraisers.
Of course, this is all well and good, but there’s nothing like getting out there and actually seeing the houses up close and personal.
Just my opinion.