Ed -

Your dislike of Zillow is well noted and we've tried to learn from your posts but honestly, you've given us very little actual feedback about why that is. You're obviously entitled to your opinion but I'd encourage you to include some research, facts or examples in your blog posts when you're trying to make a point.

If your endictment of Zillow is that we make our money via advertising, that's a criticism we can certainly live with and it's one we're increasingly proud of as our startup inches towards breaking even. I can only imagine that the television and the newspaper must drive you nuts. And google; oh boy, you must really HATE those guys and how they make money from advertising. Dude! It's the information age. Ads are simply the most popular way to monetize information. You're going to have to dislike a whole lot of people if you dislike businesses that make their money via ads.

And on the topic of information ... your post is incorrect about how Zillow has grown ... Zillow.com attracted a massive audience with Zestimate values ... without the effort of anyone in the industry. We then turned round and gave the industry free access to that audience. There are however other sites who are worthy of this criticism and have built their traffic and ad revenuew off little more than agents' listing content - hopefully you'll write about them next.

Peace.

Hi Debe,

Great attitude and good feedback, thanks. To address your issues with Zillow;

1) Comps on Zillow are something we've been working on lately - I hope you notice an improvement. Important to note that we do intentionally show as many recent sales as might possibly be similar homes. Your list will always be far more precise than ours but we're trying to get ours as tight as possible. I should also note that the comparable homes list on Zillow home detail pages is not directly used to calculate Zestimate values in the way a Realtor uses comps as the starting point for a CMA i.e. a few odd comps in the list won't impact a home's Zestimate value.

2) I'm sorry to hear about your frustration about the neighborhood assignment for the home in Providence Country Club. I took a look at Glen Abbey Way and see what you mean. Please give your seller my apologies and this explanation:

Unfortunately, we don't have a neighborhood for Providence Country Club that we could assign the home to (like this one for Providence Crossing.) When we set out to assign homes to neighborhoods, we quickly learned that there is no difinitive source of the neighborhood geographical boundary information we need. So we created it, by hand, from scratch. In that process we also learned that even trusted sources disagree on the size, shape and granularity of neighborhoods. In this case, our neighborhood boundary data isn't granular enough to outline the Providence Country Club neighborhood within Providence Crossing. I'm sorry about that. If you know of an accurate source of Providence neighborhood boundary data, feel free to send it to me.

The good news is that if you take a look at Zillow's map (below) you'll see that Providence Country Club is called out along Glenn Abbey Way. Most buyers find listings on Zillow via searching the maps; if they find your listing on Glen Abbey Way, they'll likely to notice that it's in Providence Country Club.