Thanks to TechCrunch for this one…

By now, everyone who cares about real estate has seen Zillow. There’s a new service starting soon that aims to challenge their new-found dominance in the online home values market, called Real Estate ABC.

Three month old Zillow, which gives people an indication of home values in specific locations based on publicly available comparables, will be having some competiton in the near future.

The new site is called Real Estate ABC (which is owned Internet Brands).

The Zillow competitor is in beta on a hidden URL: www1.realestateabc.com/home-values/. I have no idea if they’ll leave it up, but as of right now it’s live.

The name isn’t as cool and the design isn’t a fluid as Zillow, but it may be better in some ways. For instance, Real Estate ABC allows users to adjust property values for a particular property with an Ajax slider. Adjustable property factors include Interior, Exterior, Lot Size, View, Privacy/Noise and Local Market Conditions.

Users can also refine property values by adding or removing comparables directly on the results page. In fact, Real Estate ABC gives significant detail on comparables, including distance from a specific address. Real Estate ABC also provides a mashup with Google maps, although they do not use satellite images like Zillow.

Zillow is perhaps one of the most popular recent mashup to launch. If anything, Real Estate ABC shows that if a mashup site is going to try to make a go at creating a real business, they need to build in proprietary features that are not easily duplicated before the competition arrives.

I ran my house through this service, which unlike Zillow actually runs on Apple’s Safari browser (Zillow only runs on IE or Firefox), and it came up with the same initial starting number. Then I clicked on the ‘Adjust Value’ tab and positioned sliders that change the value of the home (by comparing it to the other houses in the neighborhood). In the end, it came up a bit lower than Zillow, but IHMO it came up with a more real-world price.

New Home Valuation Site Launches [SFHomeBlog]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.