Almost overnight Expedia made the idea of a travel agent so 1980. The Travel Industry may have acquiesced to the designs of Expedia.com that forever changed the landscape of the travel business.
However, the real estate industry is not going down without a fight.
National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC,) which has just filed a consumer protection complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that "Internet financial services and real estate provider Zillow.com is misleading consumers, real estate professionals and financial service providers in on-line home valuations.
NCRC charges Zillow with falsely representing to the public that its on-line valuations are within ten percent of the home selling price when the company really has "less than a 30 percent accuracy rate when offering the valuations for public consumption." The result for consumers, says John Taylor, NCRC president and CEO, is that "consumers are already at risk of being over extended due to the increased access to non-traditional loans, Zillow's misinformation exacerbates the situation.
Recently at a Realtor Convention in Long Beach, California, the Zillow co-founder promised that Zillow was not coming out be a Realtor killer. This is interesting as the pre-launch hype of Zillow was about it indeed replacing the need for Realtors.
I am not sure if this was by design, but it did get the company the publicity it needed to already become a common verb. Like we all might "Google it", apparently we now can "Zillow it".
As any realty agent learns in their first week is that the public records are wrought with an abundance of BAD information. Apparently Zillow or their Angel Investors did not look into this mere formality.
So when the blogsphere started harping about their bad data (yours truely included), all of a sudden Zillow realized they had to get cozey with Realtors.
They had no choice. Currently the only way they can have accurate data is by getting Board of Realtors sales records.
While the Boards have been only too happy to whore their(your) data to the online world, they have kept the sale data in a "big locked box" (to quote a past Presidential Candidate ;-)
So what started out as a tremendous marketing lesson in publicity, is becoming a lesson in Spin, as Zillow fights to stay credible, while the Industry isn't so willing to let that happen.
Any info on the thousands of loans that have been made by Washington Mutual using these inacurate tools? Will there be another crash as a result? How secure is the banking industry?
Posted by: Cochise | October 30, 2006 at 12:46 PM