Friday, June 22, 2007

Update on Zillow.com in Arizona

You can say that I have been sidetracked lately with issues with a very local flavor.

In the back of mind though was a piece of proposed Arizona legislation that concerned price valuations. Namely the Arizona Board of Appraisals made a strong play to bar Automated Valuation Models (AVM's) like Zillow.com from providing the content they do on their website.

This would have meant that private property home owners would not have been able to place their listings on Zillow, and that would have been the same for REALTORS when all things were considered. In fact according to Greg Swann of BloodhoundBlog...

As originally drafted, the bill would have outlawed virtually any estimation of value, possibly even including the casual conversations of neighbors.


So as you can see our lawmakers stepped up not only for our private property rights, but possibly even freedom of speech.

Of course Greg has the full history of this on his blog, link here.

And littlepinkhouses.com did a fabulous wrap up, linked here.

A big hand of thanks no doubt goes out to the Arizona Association of REALTORS as well. I know there were lobbying efforts being made to protect not only the REALTORS, but private property owners at the same time. I'm also quite certain that the Board of Appraisal will think twice about messing around like this again.

To celebrate the news, I just placed two new listings on Zillow this morning.

Of course my one criticism of Zillow for the local area is that they really need to update the area, both listings had to be fully entered because the addresses were not in their database. This means I could not enter the 'what else is for sale' information in the neighborhood (or called electronic lead farming if you will). Time for them to offer more service to many Kingman area customers or else Cyberhomes.com may become a better option. Oh how I love competition.

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