This map from Trulia shows some listings on the Upper West Side In the last two weeks, two powerful new Web-based tools have launched in the hopes of simplifying the home-buying and selling process. Both put vast amounts of new data into your hands and both are fun to use, but both have major kinks. As Prudential Douglas Elliman President & CEO Dorothy Herman told Newsday's Randi Marshall in a hard-hitting article about Zillow, consumers might choose to use it as an information tool, a starting point for a future purchase - or simply for fun, but "I certainly wouldn't price my house based on that." Zillow
What it does: provides free, instant valuation data for homes
Biggest plus: the promise of informational power at your fingertips
Biggest minus: data is incomplete, especially in Manhattan–where co-op sales data is not publicly available (co-ops make up about 80% of the Manhattan market) Trulia
What it does: aggregates all listings of homes for sale from various brokerage Web sites
Biggest plus: a joy for anyone who loves real estate
Biggest minus: software misses a huge number of the available homes in NY Summary
These tools are fun to use and might help you learn something about the real estate market, but they are no substitute for actual knowledge. By showing how hard it is to provide the expertise that good real estate agents carry around in their head, it proves that agents are irreplaceable after all. <click here to continue to CityVu> |