When David Gibbons gave me an early peek of the new Zillow iPhone app on Monday, my first thought was how this would take the frustration I feel online at home to the streets. Great. Now trying to figure out what’s real when it comes to home values can be frustrating everywhere!
But then I delved into it. And it became clear real fast that Zillow put a considerable amount of effort into this application.
First and foremost, the application is smartly designed, displaying critical information immediately upon opening. Once the GPS locates you, it displays the homes in your immediate area with pricing. Start walking or driving and it literally follows you.
You many think, “so what.” But I defy anyone to deny ever having the urge while driving down Sunset Blvd, the 17-Mile Drive or anywhere else and not wondering how those homes you’re passing might be incorrectly priced. I know I have.
Every home in the app has a details page presenting public record data including beds, baths, square feet, a historical look at the value of the home over one, five and 10-year periods, information about the last sale of the home and recent sales comps.
Red dots indicate a home is for sale. Blue dots represent the Make Me Move homes placed into Zillow’s database by home owners. Yellow dots mark the recently sold homes.
Touch the icons on a for sale property and the listing price appears along with some property details inside a bubble. Click the bubble and you get photos and the full set of listing details including contact info for either the seller or the listing agent.
Since Zillow allows for up to 50 photos for both the independent seller or the agent, the pressure is now on for agents to start getting with the program and take more than 6 photos of their properties.
The app also offers basic search functions for searching beyond your present location.
Missing from this experience are several key components. They include:
- Access to local amenities and school information, which would be a natural fit for a mobile house hunter
- The ability to calculate distance between destinations – e.g. a home to a local school
- The ability for the user to manage their own property
- Access to the greater world of foreclosures, which account for more than half the inventory in some markets.
The last lingering concern I have, which I continue to assign to all non MLS-based listing sites, is the accuracy and completeness of the for sale listings presented to the user.
Nevertheless, this is yet another feather placed in the “interloper” cap for taking data the traditional real estate generates and doing something cool with it. The app is free and available at the App Store.
- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc
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Interesting. I feel that the real estate apps that are out there for the iPhone are all lacking at the moment. They will catch up at some point, but it really is in its infancy.
No offense to the dev guys, but this isn’t what I’m looking for. The data is nice and it loads quickly, but I can’t save properties, view pics, or search area home for sale. It’s a one way stream of information; I don’t think this is going to stay on my phone very long.
another reason I should get an iPhone :-/
Thanks for the review!
Portland Real Estate what are the current applications lacking?
[...] Read 1000Watt Consulting’s take on the app. Sphere: Related Content [...]
Sorry to rain on the Zillow parade but I see this app finally pushing the zestimate opt-out issue out in front of homeowners, many of whom had no clue Zillow was putting a price tag next to their For Sale signs. I’ve been advocating, as have other homeowners, the right to opt-out of zestimates (or any computer generated valuation), especially if the home is for sale. The day of reckoning may be near at hand. Someone will test this in a court of law, and based on the DOJ-NAR settlement, the home seller will get this right. Just the way I see it.
http://tinyurl.com/2dvcxf
http://tinyurl.com/2lmxhj
[...] reactions to the application have been mixed. A review from 1000wattconsulting.com questions the accuracy and completeness of the for sale listings available through the application, [...]
Thanks for the info Marc. I will added to my iPhone apps right now.
Data accuracy is the key as you mentioned. Until the Trulias & Zillows of the world start getting MLS feeds, their accuracy on listings will always be questionable. I see inquires often form these sites on old, outdated properties.
If someone can figure out how to use all the cool tools of Zillow & Trulia, with the data accuracy of the MLS, well then, you will have something. Seems like Realtor.com is the one best poised to do something with this but who knows.
Tyler,
It seems to me that poise is all Realtor.com is about. A good idea that never became great. A notion that never materialized. A spark that fizzles instead of flames.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them to invent the big idea. In fact, it’s become all too clear that real estate is about many, many isolated ideas, API’s, APPs, that practitioners will have to weave together to create their own big idea.
Meanwhile, I’ve downloaded ZAPP (Zillow APP) and I am really loving it. A bit buggy, slow (maybe it’s just my phone and the horribly disappointed AT&T service) by I am fascinated by this application.
I agree that the available applications aren’t perfect, but, they are very useful. Very, very useful.
Our buyer’s brokerage just adopted the iPhone for all our agents. Here is the news release: http://pressreleasedistribution.biz/index.php/SILVER/Ann-Arbor-Buyer-s-Real-Estate-Company-Adopts-iPhone-For-All-Agents.html
I hear you Marc. I have the Zillow APP as well.
Realtor.com has a feed from most of the MLS’s, thus more reliable data. While Zillow & Trulia have good tools, they don’t have reliable data. I am not talking about the Zestimates or public records. I am talking about current listings, which is what consumers want to see.
I don’t believe it is efficient or user friendly to have the same property listed 5 different times on the same site (this is from all of the different syndication sites), nor from showing properties for sale that have been sold for months. I think R.com at least has that part down pretty well
Can R.com do more? For sure. Maybe poised was the wrong word. Positioned, they are, and have been positioned to take advantage of that for a while. I think they’ve been getting better. I don’t think they need to invent the big idea. Just keep up or be ahead of the curve.
If Zillow and Trulia could get MLS feeds, they would be a lot more relevant in my opinion.
I do not disagree with everything you said. What I admire about Trulia and Zillow is their infusing interesting components into the real estate conversation to compensate for the lack of MLS based data. They must be respected for these contributions and for continually raising the bar of what a search experience for real estate could be like.
Personally I would find Realtor.com a much better place to search if every real estate agent would take their job seriously and upload at least a dozen great pictures per listing. At the very least.
A combo of all three would be good.
Can you believe the our local MLS only allows 8 pics?
Yes I can. But I’ve seen worse cases. Be glad you aren’t a broker on the New Jersey Shore. It’s much worse there.
@reaestateraj,
I hear you but after a week of having this app, I am still fascinated by it. Granted, they may not have built it for you specifically and I do agree that there are things it cannot do. But that shouldn’t diminish what it can do.
Here’s an isolated example. I was in Silicon Valley last week having lunch in Santana Row – a make believe downtown built within the city of San Jose designed to emulate the affluent grandeur of a nondescript European town.
Yet surrounding this Hollywood set was a neighborhood made of of small homes that seemed uncharacteristic of my sense of luxury living.
Curiosity got the better of me. I opened the Zillow app and within seconds I was able to key in on the local real estate and gain a sense of the real estate market which currently no other app can offer. I felt no need to save anything, calculate anything or view pictures. In that sense, the application offered me exactly what I needed.
It seems that all too often, many of us (including me) criticize things for the sake of criticism and downgrade an app, website or whatever because it doesn’t fit into our sense of what a perfection is.
The Zillow could do more. Sure. My guess is, it will over time. But what it does offer, for free, has come in handy for me satisfying a bunch of curiosities that would otherwise pester me.
Hence my appreciation for the app and continued belied that I am not alone in finding what it does very useful.
[...] other reviews here – A 4 year old is excited, Marc Davidson’s review of the app his colleague Brian Boero commented too and examined the difference between [...]
This looks to be fairly straight-forward app (GPS coordinates of the phone mashed with existing Zillow data is about as easy as mobile development gets). Well executed, but not much practical value. Given the ease of building this, even a slight PR push in a slow market makes it worth the effort.
Realtor.com’s best opportunity is to rebuild their portal and leverage Communications Server technology to show agent presence. Brokerages are already providing a feed. Extending this feed to a brokerages email server would allow users of Realtor.com to contact the listing agent in real time and create an always-on agent to agent community network (regardless of brokerage). No more waiting for email responses.
Marc,
Spencer from Zillow here.
Great seeing you this morning at Gathering of Eagles in Dallas.
Some thoughts on the Zillow iphone app…
First, some stats. We now have had over 150K downloads after only 8 days, and it’s the #14 free app already in the itunes store. It’s a rocketship.
Second, let me address some of the good feedback you have offered here. Regarding “save to favorites” and “email to a friend”, etc — they’re all great suggestions and they’re all in the works.
Regarding the listings breadth and depth on the Zillow app… As you can see anytime on the homepage of Zillow.com, we have 3.3M for sale by agent listings, 45K FSBO listings, and 144K Make Me Move listings, not to mention data on 89M homes. Agents and brokers can upload as many photos as they want to Zillow, for free. So if you see a home with just one photo on Zillow, that’s because the agent hasn’t uploaded more (which is dumb, and you should tell him so). We update listings nightly, so our listings data should be fresh, but we’re of course beholden to the frequency and accuracy of the listings feeds which are provided to us by our listings partners.
Here’s the New York Times’ review comparing Zillow’s app vs Trulia’s. Zillow wins:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/technology/personaltech/07smart.html?_r=3&ref=personaltech
Marc, you said this morning that you think the Zillow app might be even better than the website, and you might be right (eventually). It’s a pretty incredible platform that Apple has created for us.
In summary…
The key differences between the Zillow iphone app and other real estate apps are:
- Zillow has data on all homes, not just those for sale
- Zillow is GPS enabled
- Zillow has pan and zoom, which most real estate apps don’t
[...] More: Read 1000Watt Consulting’s take on the app. [...]
Spencer,
Aside from the fact that sales based organizations will migrate AWAY from the iPhone, this application misses the value of sending an mls listings mashup to a mobile device.
The only real advantage the Zillow or Trulia iPhone apps have is that they allow users to look at a property detail page if the house is closed and there aren’t any property flyers (which is often the case because agents only get X# of free flyers and many don’t refill the box on their own dime).
However the downside of the Zillow iPhone app is that it is based exclusively on the Zestimates. This reinforces the widespread belief (true or not) that the vast majority of users of the site continue to be current homeowners checking property values, not active buyers. You should be building stuff that hypes the value of users in addition to slick tools designed to create media hype.
Wow, zillow iPhone with unreliable zestaments. Next, they will be joining Wal-Mart Real Estate. Everyone wants a piece of the pie. What’s wrong with calling your local Realtor, and getting professional service with someone who really knows their local market.
Huh, unreliable? What is reliable this days? There’s hardly a home sold today at a Realtors listed price.
And why don’t they call the Realtors? How about 55 hours lag time between return calls.
The real question Dennis is why hasn’t any real estate brokerages built their own app. The fact that Zillow filled a void is not the consumer fault or Zillows.
great job
More: Read 1000Watt Consulting’s take on