zillow/ Chapter 8 Question 3

1. http://www.zillow.com/Chapter 8 Question 3 By: Shawn Bowens Kimberly Fisher Ashley Watson Matthew Kertis

2. What is zillow.com? • Zillow.com is a website that you can go on to check out the value of a home, homes for sale, Real Estate. • The website shows the appraisal of a home through the market value of the home. This can be obtained by how much the township has the house appraised and the amount of taxes the owner pays on the house.

3. What zillow.com offers? • Home Buyers: Find homes for sale • Home Sellers: Sell Real Estate • Homeowners: Check home values • Professionals: Market Listing for free

4. Enter the address of someone’s home (my parents’) and obtain an appraisal of it. • The appraised value of my parents house was accurate with the fair market price for the house. • Zillow.com also provided me with the appraisal of the surrounding homes. • The date the house was built, how many bedrooms and baths were also provided by the website.

5. Do you think this site violates anyone’s privacy? • Our group feels that this site does not violate the privacy of the owners or anyone else. • The information that the site gives is all public information. • Anyone can obtain the information simply by going to their township and requesting to see the taxes and the given of a particular home.

6. What is Web 2.0? • A Web 2.0 is generally a loose cloud of capabilities, technologies, business models, and philosophies that characterize the new and emerging business uses of the Internet.

7. Find and describe features that demonstrate that Zillow.com is a Web 2.0 Company. • The software is used as a service. Home Buyers: Find homes for sale. Home Sellers: Sell Real Estate. Homeowners: Check home values. Professionals: Market Listing for free. • The business relies on advertising or other revenue-from-use, because if a product requires advertising to be successful, then it is not a Web 2.0 product.

8. Explain why this site might be considered a threat by traditional real estate companies. • The traditional real estate companies would be considered threatened by the Zillow.com. • The traditional real estate companies did not have the technology that Zillow has know. • There is a lot more information that Zillow has for their viewers compared to the traditional companies.

9. Explain why this site might be considered a threat by traditional real estate companies. (continued) • The Zillow website is extremely convenient to use while providing a large amount of information.

10. How might real estate agents use this site to market their services? • Real estate agents would be able to use this site to market their services by having a large amount of available customers. • The internet provides the real estate agents to market their services for a cheap price while still connecting to a large crowd. • The website provides real estate agents and links to their services.

11. How might real estate brokers use this site to advantage? • Real estate brokers can use this site to their advantage by being able to have a lot of information given to them very easily. • The website does a lot of the hard work and research for you. • It is very time consuming to research everything about the homes with out the Internet.

12. How might real estate brokers use this site to advantage? (continued) • The real estate brokers can even have their customers use this website and show the information that they need on a particular house or property. • The customer would be able to search many homes at his or her convenience with out leaving home. • The broker would be benefited by this and even have more time on his hands for other customers.