Zillow.com : Bye Bye Beta

One of the cool things about being at Inman Real Estate Connect is you can get a little “inside scoop” on some real estate technology stuff.

Some of the Zillowheads invited a few real estate bloggers to a little pow-wow and a “pre-release” of some new changes happening to Zillow.com.

Greg Swann at BloodhoundBlog isn’t at Inman, but David Gibbons at Zillow called Greg after talking to us, and Greg has a typically thorough overview of the “new” Zillow. No real need to re-hash the gist of it here, go read the Bloodhound post for details.

I will say that technically, some of us knew about this before he did (for whatever that’s worth, which isn’t a whole lot). I was tempted to post at 12:01am, just after the embargo on the news, but somehow I got sucked into a party at the Manhattan home of Google. And let’s face it, a chance to walk the hallowed halls of a Googleplex took priority. What can I say, I’m a geek and I may never have another chance to play in a Google office (I’ll post some pics tomorrow. It’s 1:54am here in NYC, and my head hurts).

Here’s one thing that the Zillow folks mentioned that, while in the grand scheme of things isn’t really a big deal, it is kind of interesting (if you are in the aforementioned geek group).

With this latest release, Zillow has lost the “beta” moniker.

Yesterday’s Zillow logo:

Today’s Zillow logo:

Look Ma, no more beta!

Yeah, I know, so what. But it really does hold some significance, probably more to the folks at Zillow than anyone else. I for one grow weary of what seems to be the overuse of the “beta” label that so many “web 2.0” companies seem to slap up and never remove like it’s supposed to make them cool or something.

Overall (as in nationally) the accuracy of “Zestimates” (Zillow’s estimates of home values) has increased, significantly in some markets (San Francisco, Miami, LA, and Atlanta for example show 18%, 21%, 22% and 28% increases in accuracy respectively).

I’ve found that in many Phoenix real estate markets, Zillow is often quite accurate. Prior to today, they report their median accuracy in Phoenix was 8.5% and has improved to 7.5% (meaning that the Zestimate for all Phoenix homes is within 7.5% of the actual home value).

Zillow has always reported how often a home’s Zestimate was within 10% and 20% of a “final sale price”. With today’s announcement, they’ve added a 5% category to their accuracy pages.

Those new numbers for the Phoenix real estate market are:

Within 5%: 36%
Within 10%: 61%
Within 20%: 84%

The way you read this would be, “36% of Phoenix homes have a Zestimate accuracy within 5% of the actual final sales price”. Incidentally, 99% of Phoenix homes are in Zillow’s database.

Nationally, the Zestimate accuracy numbers are:

Within 5%: 32%
Within 10%: 54%
Within 20%: 77%

Hence the Zestimate accuracy for the Phoenix market is better than the national averages.

You can get the Zillow Accuracy info here. With today’s upgrade, you can even download an Excel spreadsheet if you are so inclined.

Again, read Bloodhound for details. The full press release will be out at 8:00am tomorrow is here.

Thanks to David Gibbons, Drew Meyers, Amanda Hoffman and Sara Bonert with Zillow for the heads up. As we discussed, the only thing you screwed up was setting up the “clue-in meeting” for the same time as the free cocktails were being doled out at Inman. You guys owe me…

As an aside, David told us there was another announcement coming out at 8:00am Thursday regarding some partnerships that they couldn’t get into the specifics of (also noted in the podcast on Bloodhound). Inman news is currently reporting this (will slip behind Inman’s subscriber wall soon):

Zillow.com today announced partnerships with brokerage Prudential California/Nevada/Texas Realty and real estate publisher Network Communications Inc. in which more than 500,000 for-sale home listings will be fed daily to its site.

Apparently this is some different “partnership” than what David is referring to… or not. Guess we’ll find out shortly.

Update: Here is the Zillow press release on the additional news:
Yahoo!, Zillow.com And Trulia Adopt Common Real Estate Listings Data Standard
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[tags]Zillow, Zestimates[/tags]