Zillow was started by the ex-Microsoft guys who started Expedia, which is now part of Barry Diller’s empire. I occasionally use Zillow to check on the value of our house.
I’ve cropped out the numbers, but the turquoise line is the median price of homes in my town, the blue line is our house, and the red line is for the county. See how our house started to fall below the median right before we moved there? Good timing, although I admit it was purely luck. We’re in a good town to be below the median. The $ indicates when we bought the place.
A year or so ago property values started to drop, as they did in most places. We’re back down to where we were three years ago, and now I see we’ve dropped below the median for the county for the first time. Well, we’re not moving, so I’m not going to worry about it!
I don’t know if Zillow is truly reflective of property values, but it’s useful for tracking trends, as it does in the chart above. One thing I wonder, however, is if Zillow will do to real estate what the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide once did to back issues of comic books, and start to lead the market rather than follow it. Later, eBay came along, greatly diminishing the utility of an annual price guide. Old comics flooded the market and prices for certain issues collapsed, while the market for one-of-a-kind original art skyrocketed.