Zillow is a must see

If the site isn’t down – it’s been hammered by heavy demand since its launch — check out Zillow.com.

Among other things, this much-anticipated site is an automated home valuation tool, but it’s also a lot more.

It’s impossible for any site operating on this scale to be accurate in every detail, but it did a pretty fair job on the one property I checked, my old home at 2047 N. Seminary, in the DePaul area.

I sold it after a gut-rehab for $250,000 in 1979 or 1980 — then a high price for the area. It’s had only one other owner after my buyer, Mark Weiss, who now has it on the market for about $1.7 million. Many of you may recognize Mark from his commercials on WBBM 780, or from one of his books.

Zillow places the value range for this property at $1.1M to $1.5M, but then it’s missing many of the upgrades that the property has undergone, and its baseline information is inaccurate in several respects.

Not to worry. Zillow gives you a 5-step process to provide it with more information and recomputes the estimated value based on the facts you provided. The final result, for a property priced in this range, is amazingly close to the asking price.

In real estate parlance, Zillow is a “must-see.”

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