Zillow: watch the people who are watching you

Zillow blog brings us news that Zillow.com is raising the already high level of real-estate induced navel gazing with a new feature that adds a page view count to every property record on the site. Yes, now you too can watch the people who are watching your home on Zillow.

Page counters now appear at the bottom of a home's details page and display the number of times your home has been viewed during the month, and since Zillow launched in Feb. of 06.

Even though I haven't taken the plunge with a Zillow Make Me Move price, or posted my home for sale, I felt a twinge of disappointment that my house wasn't the eyeball magnet I imagined it might be.

In the month of February, so far, just one person has looked it up on Zillow (that would be *ahem* me). A total of 39 people have viewed it in the last year -- I'm guessing 30 of them are me, plus a smattering of nosy friends (don't worry, I've Zillowed their houses too). Compare that with almost 300,000 lookups for my town and 13 million for Middlesex county in Massachusetts, where I live.

Actually, the penetration of Zillow is pretty astounding. A company spokesman told me that in the Boston area, around 80 percent of all homes have been looked up at least once --an astounding figure, given the relatively small user base that Zillow has.

Still, the number of page views your home gets tells you hardly anything about how "hot" your property is and, I worry, may be a kind of empty statistic that some homeowners are likely to interpret, wrongly, as signaling a lack of interest in their property -- especially if its for sale. At the very least, its simplistic to think that potential buyer interest in a property maps neatly to the kind of metrics (like page views, or click throughs) that Web based companies and publications have traditionally used to measure their success.