February 16, 2006

Zillow #2 in Real Estate Category after Second Day Online

Zillow, a startup that allows users to view home valuations and specs on an interactive map, launched on February 7, 2006 and by Feb. 9 achieved a rank of #2 in the Hitwise Real Estate category, receiving more traffic that category leaders like Rent.com and Yahoo! Real Estate. Nearly a week later, on Feb. 14, Zillow remained the #2 Real Estate site, accounting for 3.8% of category visits.

Zillow is a fascinating site, allowing you to enter a street address, see it on a satellite map, and view the valuation for that house as well as surrounding homes. Its average session time reflects this - on Saturday, Feb.11, Zillow's average session time was 18 minutes 11 seconds, well ahead of the Real Estate category average session time of 10 minutes 49 seconds.

Bloggers have helped the spread of Zillow - according to Technorati, as of Feb. 16 there were 825 blog mentions - not bad for just one week. One post on the Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag references the home valuations of a few local executives like Eric Schmidt and Larry Ellison, fueling a new form of real estate voyuerism.

While Zillow does not provide valuations for apartment buildings like the one I live in in San Francisco, I was able to check the value of the homes on my street. Until I have at least $1.5 million and preferably $3 million to spend, I won't be buying a house in my current neighborhood. If I win the lottery, I might be able to buy Danielle Steel's 34-room house up the street for a mere $10 million or so.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 10:15 AM

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