Zillow.com: Free Real Estate Estimates

We’re a little behind the curve on Zillow.com, which aims to do for real-estate shopping and home buying what Expedia did for booking flights. Using an aggregate of data including tax records, sales histories, and other home prices in the region, the site generates legally ambiguous ‘Zestimates’ from just an address—think Google Maps with price tags.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg and Katie Boehret took a look at Zillow last week and came to very much the same conclusion as we did: It’s far from perfect, but it looks like a great tool for smart home buyers and sellers to use in the coming (happening!) FSBO revolution.

Plus, think how useful this is going to be to find out if the people who dress fancy at parties actually live in a nice place or not. Sadly, it doesn’t work so well in New York at the moment, so we used Joel’s parents’ house for the screenshot. If you rob and murder them this evening, please don’t tell them where you got the address.

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