Archive for June, 2006

The job of our product development team is to come up with ideas we think will be useful to you.  In our test lab, we spend a lot of time making sure things work well with various Web browsers, operating systems, etc.
Every now and then, someone writes a tool in their "spare time" […]

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently introduced a new blog, authored by an assortment of Seattle-area real estate professionals.  According to PubSub, this two month-old blog has already climbed its way to the #1 spot on the Real Estate List since, jumping 22 spots in one day!  Is this just a spike due to a recent provocative […]

The actor who played Screech on the early-90’s teen series "Saved by the Bell" claims to be at risk  of losing his Wisconsin home via foreclosure, and is asking fans of show to pitch in and help.
Actor Dustin Diamond is selling t-shirts on his Web site, www.getdshirts.com, to raise the $250,000 he says is needed […]

Teardowns, knockdowns, bash-and-builds vs. McMansions, pop-tops, and snout homes: It’s a war out there these days, as detailed in today’s New York Times article that would get anyone’s heart racing — even if you didn’t own a home.
What’s happening is that folks are buying homes and hoping to tear them down to rebuild […]

The Future of Real Estate Marketing blog has a great series this week that poses 10 questions to various online real estate sites.  Today it was Zillow’s turn.
Meanwhile Peter Abilla has a series of interviews with technology companies on his site, shmula.com.  He recently spoke with Spencer Rascoff.
Anything else we should be reading?

In a post a couple weeks ago, I noted some of the data indicating slowing appreciation at the national level.  I wanted to follow up with some more local examples that further illustrate this trend or show exceptions to it.   We’ll start this week with an exception: Phoenix, AZ.  In the chart below, you’ll see […]

A new study by Bizjournals.com names the "smartest" cities in the U.S. — with Seattle topping the list, followed by San Francisco and Austin.  The analysis is based on the educational level of adults in America’s 53 largest cities.
We wondered: any correlation between home values and purported "smartness" of a city’s residents?  According to our […]

In April, we launched Bird’s Eye View images, and asked you to send us any quirky, curious or interesting images you found.   Posted here are 3 entries we deemed winners of our Bird’s Eye View contest.  Brian R. found this home in Laguna Beach, CA that looks like it is being given to someone as […]

For the past few days, Pubsub’s Real Estate List has been the biggest referrer of readers to this blog (excluding Google and Zillow.com). When I clicked over to see what the fuss was about, I noticed that we were ranked 3rd on Saturday and 5th on Sunday in Pubsub’s daily blog ranking. Welcome Pubsub readers […]

It’s been a while since we talked about data coverage. The whole team here has been working hard to keep adding more homes to our database, calculate more and better Zestimate values, and improve our latency with regards to the latest home transactions.
Since our last post on the subject in April we have added […]