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.

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.

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

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.