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.

I'm your realtor. Please be my friend!

If you ask me, there's a certain amount of magical thinking in the Web real estate space these days, which may mean that we're warming up for a March, 2000-esque bubble burst. Anecdotally, you read folks like Brad, over at Inman blog, saying that he's seeing a volume of business plans being foisted on him by startups is "comparable to 2000." There are other harbingers as well, like the abundance of patently hare-brained sites trying to get buzz going around well-thumbed over ideas, like online property listings.

Take, for example, NeighborhoodNetwork.com, a Minneapolis/St. Paul-focused site that bills itself as a "revolutionary Realtor sponsored network that enables homeowners to maximize their return on investment in their single largest asset...their home." Maximize it how? It's not really clear yet -- Neighborhoodnetwork.com hasn't filled in its Mission or FAQ pages. However, the idea appears to be that you, the homeowner, working through a broker, massage your home's MLS information and post pictures of your house. So, basically, we're talking about slide shows to accompany MLS listings? And that's new because....?

I guess the new bit is supposed to be this quasi-social networking concept of "neighborhood news" that homeowners can add. I can't see the page because, well, I don't own a home in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but I'm presuming this is all about agents mining the brainshare of area homeowners so they provide you with the local "context" about home listings that's the secret sauce in so many R.E. 2.0 business plans.

Ignoring the ham-fisted Java programming and maps integration that gives neighborhoodnetwork.com an eerie "Windows 3.1" feel, why would you do this? Their argument is that Neighborhoodnetwork makes it easier for your house to get "visibility" and to sell, when you're ready to do so. The page's logo "Where market time is all the time" says it all -- rather than endure the torture of anonymity while you live in your home with no plans to sell for, say, 15 or 20 years, you're supposed to strike up a friendship with an agent, then piggy back on their social network, providing a steady stream of photos, updates and neighborhood dirt in the hopes that a "power buyer" swoops in with a great offer? It's kind of a strange take on Zillow's Make Me Move, but without the tidy conceptual packaging that the MMM feature has.

My prediction: three years from now, we'll be writing about the great Web 2.0 crash and the biggest Web 2.0 flops. The picked over body of at least one R.E. 2.0 site will be on the pile (Trulia? Redfin? Zillow?) Alas, a site like NeighborhoodNetwork.com won't get big enough to even be recognized.

Cyberhomes.com: Premature Betaculation?

It wasn't so long ago that the test runs of software known as "beta releases" were something mysterious, secretive and stealthy -- small releases of unready code internally at a company, or externally to a circle of well known and forgiving reviewers.

Google exploded that notion with their practice of throwing almost every bit of code they manage into huge, public and lengthy beta releases. Why, Blogger, which I'm using to write and publish this spent just shy of four _years_ in "beta," from the time Google bought Blogger in February, 2003, to December, 2006, when the company finally got around to ripping the faded "beta" label off its popular blogging tool.

But while the rules governing what is and isn't a "beta" release may have changed, there are a few tried and true rules that still apply such as the notion that "thine beta shall not make thyself look clueless." As noted first over at FutureofRealEstateMarketing, the folks over Fidelity National Information Services might have failed on that count with their new site/service: cyberhomes.com.

Now you know a domain like that cost some serious change -- so how come their "beta" release didn't support the Firefox Web browser? Very 1999, if I do say so myself. I'm particularly amused by their assertion (below) that they support "Firefox Version 1.5 and up," but that my computer, running Firefox 2.0.0.1 isn't supported. Hey, I'm just an old English major here, but isn't 2.0 bigger than 1.5? To their credit, Cyberhomes.com seems to have corrected the problem in the last hour or so, but you've got to wonder how a major "oops" like checking for (and supporting) the standard Web browser types (and even some non-standard ones -- Flock? Opera?) slipped through an internal review.

Cyberhomes appears to be another swing at replicating Zillow.com's success at consolidating property and sales information for residential real estate, with one small difference: Cyberhomes is backed by Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. "a leading provider of core financial institution processing, card issuer and transaction processing services, mortgage loan processing and related information products and outsourcing services to financial institutions, retailers, mortgage lenders and real estate professionals." Can you say "information goldmine"? You bet. As the FIS web site points out "nearly 50 percent of all U.S. residential mortgages are processed using FIS software." So if you've ever wondered where all that data you sent off with your mortgage application goes, now you know!

Besides beefing up my home's value by around $30,000 over Zillow's Zestimate (thanks, Cyberhomes!), this new site has, admittedly, a slick UI with easy access to demographic data for my town and a nice expanding menu of comparable sales. Drill down and they've got some pretty darn cool census and market analysis features built in that may make picking a town to live in less a matter of guess work, not to mention cool graphical data on everything from building permits in the area, to average commute time, unemployment rate, price per square foot -- you name it.

According to the the Cyberhomes marketing materials, the site's database includes "more than 100 million property, ownership, sales, and mortgage records, covering more than 85% of the United States population."

But like every other R.E. 2.0 site out there, Cyberhomes is pimping for you to give us the skinny on your own house (and your motivation is....?) To quote: "No one knows the neighborhood like you do, so we give you the power to include the things you know are special about your place, your neighborhood, and your community." According to the site, but providing information on your home, you'll get a better idea of "what it could mean in the context of local market conditions. " Whatever that means.

Conclusion: look past the fact that these guys crapped out on the beta launch and give cyberhomes a try. You might like what you see.