There are a host of web-based real estate tools out there for anyone looking to acquire, revalue, or manage their properties. What I see out there is that because of the last few years being dominated by moving of
single family homes, almost all of these tools are geared for the buyers with that intention.
However, there has to have been some thought put into these online services that allows for them to be easily used by those of us who are in the business of finding, acquiring, and reassessing
rental housing. What about us? Hm.
Zillow.
The point of Zillow is to help you value property you already own, or value property you’re looking into. According to the site, their pricing matrix is based on County/Municipal data, which in most areas the taxed values do not coincide with actual market pricing, but they augment that information with
“zillions of [other]
data points�.
Whatever that means.
Curious to rate the results, I ran some of my own properties through the system and was rather impressed. It recognized which properties were multi and which were single family, along with some other pertinent details. And except for the properties which I know are oddballs (weird shaped lots, deep speculation plots), the valuations were reasonable. For research purposes: through the
“advanced search� you can choose
“multi-family� by zip code and then sort by
“Home Type�. If you’re looking to help value a potential purchase, or if you’re dubious about an offer, this is a decent resource for ballparking some figures.
Side notes: Back in early 2006, Zillow wasn’t yet up to snuff, as evidenced by
The Rage Diaries, where one can see an example of being
“zillowed� by the software. You’ll also notice that their
mapping interface is a mashup, which is pretty cool. And
on their own blog, they break-down the creation of a custom property
“Zestimate�.
