Zestimate the value of your house or the one you want!!!

My wife was preparing dinner listening to NPR, and I was on the net wrapping up my work for the day. Well not really..My work never ends...

Anyhow..We listen to NPR a lot, and I heard about a website being mentioned on a program called "All Things Considered." I couldn't get the name at first. Then I heard the name Richard Barton. I quickly went to NPR and searched for Richard Barton, and found out the site they were discussing. It was called "Zillow.com." Richard Bartron created Expedia.com, a successful online travel website now owned by Microsoft.

Zillow.com is a pretty cool site, where you can enter an address of a house and you can get an estimate of a house. I did the same for our house, and was a pretty good estimate. So now he is into real estate arena. He already have about 75 employee and still in early phase of development. According to Richard the site still doesn't cover most of New York area. The site even crashed on the day of its launch. They are working hard to move forward.

Some of the real estate people don't think that Zillow could outsmart the real estate agents. Richard however, says that he is not trying to compete with them but just trying to educate the consumer so that the consumer will know what he/she is talking about with the agent. Most of the time consumer is very less educated when it comes to real estate. Zillow even wants the real estate agents to advertise on their website.

So lets see how it will turn out. And yes the debate between the real estate agents and Zillow.com.

But first try to "zestimate" your house on Zillow.com and see whether you get an aerial picture or not.