Yahoo Creates Home Values Meta Search

May 25, 2007 at 10:43am ET by Greg Sterling

Zestimates from Zillow have proven to be a tremendous hit with the public, although they’ve been criticized for being too high or too low in some cases. Now Yahoo has taken Zillow’s home valuation data (they’ve had a partnership for several months) and combined it with similar data from other providers, eppraisal.com and reply.com, in a new and improved Home Values section of Yahoo Real Estate.

Here’s a provided example in Seattle, with valuations in the upper right. And here’s the Yahoo Local & Maps blog post that explains the new functionality in further detail.

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Search Engines: Real Estate | Yahoo: Real Estate

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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http://www.homegain.com Louis Cammarosano

By selecting a relatively unknown company whose core business is not even real estate (Reply) and a start up (eppraisal)to provide side by side instant homevaluations with Zillow, Yahoo wittingly or unwittingly severely damages Zillow’s claim that they are the “Kelly’s Blue Book of Home Valuations”

(a claim I’ve always had issue with because its not true and its a foolish analogy as cars are fungible depreciating assets, while homes are unique and generally appreciating assets)

That Reply can also run public data through an algorithm and spit out a valution highlights that what Zillow is doing is nothing special and not worthy of the hype they have created simply by taking last millenium’s technology and wrapping it in a big “Z”. “Zestimates” E-”Z” ads etc.

Oh, by the way HomeGain.com, the company at which I am the General Manager, also has an instant homevaluation tool-the descendant of our original instant homevaluation tool from 1999.

Yahoo’s integration is slick and great for consumers.