To many, the Playboy Mansion is only a figment of one’s imagination. Many have heard the stories of its “bachelor” lifestyle, some have seen the mansion on TV, even fewer have stepped foot in it, and only one has lived its life. If you’re like me, I wanted to see it. Now […]

Every day I read about gas prices going up, beautiful farmlands that have given over to developers — or mega-stores — and the threat of global warming. Then, today, I read about a woman who died by the name Jane Jacobs. I had never heard of her, but she made it her mission to champion […]

According to the Wall Street Journal, the days of the 50-year mortgage are almost upon us: "The 50-year home mortgage doesn’t exist yet, though the idea is being seriously batted around among lenders as home price increases continue to far outpace income gains, making monthly payments on more traditional loans less affordable." [WSJ, 4/22/06; requires […]

In case you missed it, the first home Elvis Presley ever owned is for sale on eBay. The single-story Memphis home is 3,000-square feet, has four bedrooms and is loaded with anecdotes of Elvis’ life there. According to the eBay post, Elvis purchased this home with the money he made from the hit […]

We get a lot of questions about the origination of our data on individual homes. The simple answer is that it comes from individual localities (mostly counties), which collect home facts, tax information and transactions as public data. But considering there are more than 3,000 U.S. counties, and many use vastly different systems […]

Interesting news item from the Orlando Sentinel this week, about the true meaning of “waterfront property.” It seems developers in this land-locked region of central Florida are developing manmade lakes as fast as homes, and charging “waterfront” prices. A quick Zillow scan around Orlando shows some neighborhoods with lakes on every street.

By now, we hope you’ve discovered our new Bird’s Eye View images, which allow you to examine a home at an angle, see all sides of the home, and tell how it is positioned on the lot.  These images are so clear that you might see some curious or interesting things as you […]

Great idea from David Porter about keeping folks abreast of updates in our data coverage as we build out our beta site.  We currently have approximately 65,241,670 homes on Zillow.com which is up 5% from the roughly 62M homes that we had at Zillow’s beta launch in February.  Most of these additions are homes already […]

This is an exciting day for us at Zillow, as we announced this morning the addition of 3D-like, “birds-eye” aerial photos to our beta site. These remarkably clear and detailed images, shown alongside home details and Zestimates, come from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform.
Back in December, when we first saw bird’s eye imagery on Microsoft’s […]

According to a study of 2005 home purchases, 40% of sales of existing homes last year were to buyers of second homes — 28% of homes were bought for investment purposes and 12% were bought as vacation homes. Wow, that’s amazing. There are of course demographic factors driving this trend, as well as favorable tax […]

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