Barton: Before Zillow, there was no resource for automated home valuations
Rich Barton · Expedia & Zillow: Rich Barton · Jun 14, 2021 · at 31:39
Zillow co-founder Rich Barton describes how homeowners estimated their property values before automated valuation models like the Zestimate existed.
0:00 / 0:43exact quote · 43.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The way people did it was to just basically watch the market in their local neighborhood, right? Which was kind of hard to do, but if you keep some basic tabs on homes around your, you, or like yours that are being sold, what they're listing for, what they're selling for, it was hard to find out what they sold for, but you could see what they're listed for, and people would kind of triangulate and make guesses. So they're running their own little version of the Zestimate algorithm now, but anyway, they're doing math. They're saying, oh, that place across the street, that's listed for 600,000 dollars, that's got one less bedroom, and we're a little bit bigger, and our view's a little better, maybe our house is worth 700,000 dollars. People were doing that, but there was no resource to go to.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Rich Barton
Barton believes every home in the country ought to be for sale
“Every home in the country ought to be for sale at the right price.”
Rich Barton: Zillow is not trying to replace real estate agents
“You're mistaken if you think we're trying to replace the agent and replace the industry.”
Barton: You only need to see slightly further ahead than others to win
“You don't have to see too far into the future. If you can see a little bit further into the future than the rest, you know, you can really get way ahead.”
Barton: Coining a made-up brand name is harder but much more valuable
“Creating a new word is very ambitious, and very long-term, and very difficult. But if you are successful, you completely own that word in the dictionary, so to speak, and you get to fill it with whatever meaning you can infuse into it. So it takes, it's a lot …”
Two-syllable brand names sounding like dog names make the best verbs
“Since then, I've liked two syllables. I think that's the most memorable. I think having it sound like a dog's name, a good dog's name can be turned into a verb.”
Barton: Aggregate consumer demand first, and business models and partners follow
“These are about empowering consumers and then let the chips fall where they may from an industry perspective, right? Building for the future of what consumers want was what we were trying to do, and we were really secondarily thinking about the organization of…”