Start using Zillow for your next house hunting

I have moved from state to state and city to city to sell my house and look for another one due to job changes and relocation several times.

For the house hunting, traditionally, we relied on realtors in certain areas to send us the new house listings via email so that we can review and decide which house to visit. There are also some nice houses that sale by owner that we would like to buy but usually realtors do not hold such type of information as they don’t have incentive to do so. we can go to certain website such as www.forsalebyowner.com but usually the listings in those type of websites are not very comprehensive.

Such traditional way for house hunting is not efficient as realtors usually only focus on his/her area, limiting your search scope.   

With growing of digital market, Zillow (www.zillow.com) becomes more and more popular for house hunting.

Several improvements from Zillow website that I observed during the recent years:

-          More and more people and real estate firms use Zillow. The house listings that my realtor sent to me almost all appeared in Zillow at the same time.

-          Sale by Owner houses are more popular now in Zillow.

-          For the house listed, you can see how many times the house were reviewed, how many people has saved the house for future reference, and how many days the house are on Zillow.

-          Open house information is provided.

-          House selling history is also nicely populated.

Some potential improvement that I can think about:

-          House value estimation. In some areas, the listing house prices are way above the Zillow estimated prices. This is either due to house trend change in the local market or due to the inaccurate estimation of the local market.

-          Tax information. Sometimes the tax information is not accurate.

-          Location map. Sometimes the map locator is not accurate or may appear double times on the map.

-          I recently found that the Zillow App in my iPhone shows the open house time in West Coast time in front page, but the time appeared in inside contents has an eastern time zone.

Despite such shortcomings, Zillow becomes a very popular, powerful, and market leading tool for house hunting.

The trend seems becoming, instead of one-way communication that realtor inform you for the potential houses, you are also doing your homework to find the potential house in Zillow and inform your realtors. Such two-way communication significantly improved the housing hunting experience and efficiency and thanks for the digital market innovation.