After hearing all of the hype about the new website, www.zillow.com, of
course we had to challenge it.
We gave Zillow a lot
of leeway, deferring to its Beta status and its disclaimer that it was not
up to speed in many localities. And it indeed it was not. There was no
information about our home county in Southeast Georgia, nor in several
others in semi-rural areas close to Atlanta. There were gaps in places
where we thought that coverage would be better. A correspondent in Houston,
where Zillow ranks itself with two stars and says it has data on most
houses reported that neither the home she just sold nor the one she just
bought appeared at all nor did her son's home in Austin. Another friend's
home on a remote island in Puget Sound did better. Her entire neighborhood
was on line but with only very limited information available from
assessor's records. In Denver, rated by Zillow as having four stars worth
of data, we found a lot of information although we were lacking the
knowledge to evaluate it, and in Virginia there was a very strange blip
which we will talk about later.
In order to give Zillow a fair shot
we picked a town that Zillow advertises as having thorough coverage at
present and is one which we know well. The town, in the ...
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