Does that leave any real competition in the space?
Generally speaking the biggest competitor to any innovate website is the status quo and apathy. Every startup I have ever been in had a harder fight against people that were reluctant to move to better technology than against our direct competitors.
88% --- eighty eight percent --- of home sales (presumably: owner-occupied single-family residence sales) were done using licensed real estate agents in 2013. A staggering amount of money is funneled through that profession, which as I understand it exercises guild-like control over the MLS databases.
Here in Houston, nobody uses Zillow because their data is not reliably up-to-date. The city has a custom solution: har.com. It's not as pretty, but it's what all the realtors in the city actually use.
For example, it puts my house at about $50k under my next-door neighbor's house, despite my home being larger, with more upgrades (about $100k worth), with one more bedroom and an additional full bathroom.
The identical house to mine, a block over, is $30k more than mine, but still $20k under the neighbor's home. A home another block away, similar to my neighbor's, but slightly smaller is actually on the market for $2k more than theirs.
Another house, identical to mine, half a block over in a different direction is Zestimated at almost $90k more than mine. And a similar house down the road is on the market for $75 more than mine.
My neighbors, directly behind me, have a model one size smaller than mine, and have done a tremendous amount of work on their home. Custom landscaping, high-end playground for their kids, fences, completely remodeled basement, and one more bedroom than my house, Zillow puts it at $10k under mine.
So within, basically 2.5 blocks, in a cookie cutter suburb, we have almost $100k variance, with Zestimates at least $50k under market prices in some cases, and $50k over in others, and smaller homes Zestimating to be worth more than larger homes next door.
Believe it or not this is an improvement from a couple years ago, but no reputable agent in my area uses Zillow for anything.
Trulia, by way of comparison, puts my house at $20k more than Zillow and flips the relationship of small/big houses so they make slightly more sense pricewise.
Redfin seems to be the closest.
The change in house prices block by block in many places can go from 20-30K to 300K to 800K depending on whether the block has been restored or are old burned out 100 year homes. Also, crime levels can change quite a bit in a one mile radius.
Zillow will only know what a house is worth when it is either sold or when you have it appraised and manually enter the details. I don't think any reasonable person would expect Zillow to know about improvements made (like work done inside a house or landscaping).
My neighbor just listed his house for a price that I thought was kind of high. He sold it within a day of holding an open house. My zestimate went up 2 days later.
I think Zillow actually works surprisingly well, for what it does.
Well sure, but one of the reasons local realtors have dumped it as a source of information is that buyers and sellers were starting to latch onto the Zestimates like they were gospel.
If a Zestimate was too high (like my neighbor's house), the seller would insist it go on the market at a very high value, and then end up with a bad relationship with their realtor when it didn't sell. Realtors don't have time for this nonsense.
If a Zestimate was too low (like my house), buyers would want to negotiate down under a fair market value. Again, realtors don't have time for this kind of thing.
In either case, Zillow was skewing the market. And we're not talking by a couple thousand dollars either, but on 20-40% swings.
In a neighborhood like mine, where the Zestimate is off by up to $100k from one house to the comparable one next door, the Zestimate becomes a hindrance on the fair market and causes more problems than it's worth.
It's like people getting medical advice off the internet, it's better not to because it causes too many problems in the established industry and not in a good startup "disruption" sense but in a "fucking everything up" sense.
The reaction from local realtors has been pretty swift and strong against Zillow for these, among other reasons. In an area like mine, I'm not even sure what it's useful for: the tax assessment fmv is wildly different, actual buy/sell prices are wildly different, it provides almost no value for pricing your own home to sell, and no value when buying a home that your local MLS doesn't provide (and even worse it's frequently wildly out of date). I suppose if I was looking for a rental it might provide some value, but the few rentals in my area have long since been occupied and Zillow still shows them up and available.
It's basically the worst kind of disinformation, close enough to look reliable, but ultimately a waste of people's time.
Realtor.com was very kludgy but it was leaps better than the local MLS website even if well below the UX of Trulia/Zillow
Both the listing agent of my old home and my buying agent in the new state asked for Trulia reviews when the process was over
/1-random-data-point
To really understand why it's different takes some knowledge of the industry. The biggest difference, the contact information on the listing is actually the broker who listed it! And it's free for anyone to post.
Oh... And it's the easiest to use! At least I think so :-D
Note: I work for Househappy
As well, we have some of the highest data integrity in the business and are continuously trying to make it better...
And less properties, we're working on that too! After all we're a bit over a year old! Give is time!
Zillow's site is crap compared to Trulia. Hopefully they acknowledge that and bring Zillow's data onto Trulia's stack.