Baron Briefs

Someone at Zillow let a feature announcement slip outside the corporate network tonight. It looks like Zillow is going after the neighborhood conversation, too.

Yahoo! Real Estate added two new online appraisal sources—Reply! and eppraisal.com—to their home value section this week. They join Zillow to form a home value estimates “trifecta” for consumers.

In my opinion, this is a big win for eppraisal.com. Just recently, eppraisal.com moved into the top 100 of real estate sites on the web according to Hitwise. Now, they will share “shelf space” with two competitors who each have millions in VC funding. Congratulations to Erik Hersman and his team over at Realty Thoughts on yet another victory.

vFlyer has assembled an excellent view of Real Estate 2.0. Twenty-six “representative” companies are spread out over thirteen different categories. Zillow tops everyone with four category appearances while Trulia and ActiveRain tie for second with three.

vFlyer was kind enough to include RealtyBaron in the “Reviews” category along with Homethinking and IncredibleAgent.

In a matter of hours today, I lost $10 to Zillow with nothing to show for it. I used the same ad copy that costs me $1.27 per conversion on Google. I guess visitors were too busy asking about the paint job on Joe’s house to glance at the ads. My dismal results below:

UPDATE: Zillow’s David G. emailed last night. His comments:

Your ad should not have served that rapidly. We’re working on it and I’ll get back to you with an update and a solution as soon as we figure out what’s up.

David

Note to bootstrappers: don’t sit on a new feature announcement too long or someone with much better funding will grab headlines with a similar feature.

So, rather than appearing as a quick and nimble entrepreneur, I get to appear as an “us too” and prematurely announce our new answer service, RealAnswers(TM), with a side-by-side comparison to Zillow’s new Home Q&A. That’s right. RealtyBaron quietly launched an answer service alongside our home search, RealSearch(TM), way back on January 5th. The purpose is to—you guessed it—answer questions about homes.

Here’s how it compares to Zillow’s new Home Q&A:

The magic appears to be gone from most real estate markets around the country. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still explore your real estate fantasies. Fantasy real estate games will be hitting the web in coming weeks. When Drew Meyers called for a virtual housing stock market game based on the Zillow API, both Realius and Realivent replied saying development is already under way.The first battle ground for Realius and Realivent? The rights to the trademark Fantasy Real Estate™. (See the comments to see what I mean).

Business 2.0 put real estate on the cover of their November edition which arrived in the mail this week. As with any real estate feature, I dove in immediately. The coverage is good because it doesn’t dwell on the bubble bursting. Rather, opportunity is the focus.

Within seconds, however, my eyes were drawn to a footer on page 85 titled “New Ways to Buy and Sell: The latest real estate websites go beyond just searching the listings”. Occupying one of only eight panels was none other than RealtyBaron.com:

It’s an awesome feeling to see a major business publication take notice of my creation. Thanks, Business 2.0.

Zillow launched MyZillow earlier this week allowing anyone to save a list of favorite homes and track their Zestimates after signing up for an account. It didn’t take long for mortgage brokers to figure out how to profit from it:

Every time a broker does a refi, they can use the appraisal to work up the estimate to match the real value. Then you can save that estimate in MyZillow. You get a monthly report on that homes value. Now you know about how much the home has appreciated, and how much of the mortgage is likely paid off. With this data, you have a pretty good idea of your existing client base’s equity, and can market to them accordingly.

Based on this information, you could send out reminders that they may have reached 80% LTV, and should look into getting their MI dropped. Or, you could send out offers on HELOC’s, or Cash Outs.

Not only do I fail to see how Zillow can possibly prevent this, but it’s also an end run around Zillow’s core business model–advertising. How long before we see a website using Zillow’s API to help manage marketing campaigns on behalf of mortgage brokers?

FYI, I’m not Zillow-bashing here. I’m hoping someone–Zillow or otherwise–can debunk this because the last thing I or anyone wants are more mortgage offers in the mail.

CORRECTION: False alarm. Somehow I skimmed over the fact the broker was referring to a previous client…not a prospective client as first thought. Not so sinister after all.

I launched our first integration with Zillow early this morning. Not bad considering the API has only been available for one week. (Am I the first? Surely someone from Zillow can confirm it in the comments if true.)

Like a good programmer should, I designed the integeration separate from the RealtyBaron.com website. As a result, anyone who is using Java as their web platform can use the same software code I used to integrate. The project’s home can be found at http://code.realtybaron.com/docs/zillow-api

The source is not yet available and the documentation was hurried. Drop me an email if you have questions, comments, or need help using the toolkit: marc@realtybaron.com

As of this morning, RealtyBaron.com is now using Zillow’s API to help homeowners estimate the value of their home when performing a Listing Auction. It’s the first in a serious of integration points we see possible between Zillow and RealtyBaron.

To see the API in action, enter your home address from our homepage and continue to the next page (FYI, we don’t capture any of your information until you reach the end of the wizard). If you entered an address Zillow has in its database, the next page should have a Zestimate pre-loaded in the form. Here’s an example:

Once again, kudos to Zillow for making it possible!