Author: David Tobey

So you’ve seen our Zestimates, explored Zillow Advice and even browsed the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace.  You’re done with Zillow now, right? Wrong. Zillow offers dozens of amazing tools, all at your fingertips. Allow me to share one of my favorites: Zillow’s Web Tools and Webpage widgets.

Zillow’s Web Tools section is one of our best “hidden gems”, and our Webpge widgets are the 20-carat diamond. Few things are as interesting to your visitors, or as powerful for co-branding, as Zillow’s homebrew quizzes, tools and home-search widgets – and best of all, they’re incredibly simple to set up. If you can cut and paste, you can use Zillow to draw more traffic to your site. Here’s just a sample of our toys, all absolutely free:

Newest Homes In Your Area

Everyone loves to look at the latest homes for sale in their area. By giving visitors to your blog the opportunity to shop as they read, you’re making your website an even more invaluable resource.

Poll – “When Will The Market Bottom?”

Ah, democracy inaction! Entertain your visiting armchair economists with this ingenious little quiz. By encouraging visitors to speculate on the demise of the real estate market, you can increase stay-times on your webpage too.

Zillow Mortgage Payment Calculator

Mortgage calculators are the granddaddy of top-tier interactive widgets for real estate, finance and agent websites – and few are as simple, elegant and welcoming as Zillow’s. Your visitors simply enter their loan amount, loan type and interest rate for calculation, and they’re presented with estimated monthly payments.

Lender Reputation Widget

It’s the feature our lenders love to hate, and hate to love! Zillow Mortgage Marketplace customers can, and often do, rate their experience with mortgage lenders. This widget can help you promote your amazing customer service and competitive rates.

And there are dozens of others: the most expensive homes in your area, up-to-the-minute mortgage rates, Zillow All-Star badges and more. Check out what Zillow can do for your Web site today.

Everyone, I have huge news: I’m retiring from Zillow. I’ve recently come into a lot of money.

About a week ago I received a Zillow email out of nowhere from this charming woman, Ms. Helen Samule Doe, daughter of the late former Oil Minister of Gambia, Marcus Doe. She saw my apartment listing on Zillow and was so impressed by my honesty that she felt she could trust me. She wants me to invest her oil fortune in American real estate. All I have to do is open up an account and wire her cash for fees so she can deposit over $9 million dollars. She’s going to split the proceeds with me.

This is the best plan ever.

. . .

If you didn’t believe a word I said, good. Occasionally, our users report weird emails being sent to them through Zillow. They range from scenarios like the above to suspicious, out-of-nowhere offers to buy listings at outrageous prices, to even weirder stuff. All sorts of users can receive these emails, too — basically, if you have a [Contact Me] button on your profile, you may be “contacted.”

Zillow is popular — really, really popular — and like other extremely popular websites such as Craigslist, we’re targeted by fraudsters for abuse. So how do you protect yourself?

Zillow’s got a great fraud resource page – check it out. And in general, don’t provide any personal or financial information. You can report scams to the authorities and our fraud research page provides links to do so. For the most part, just listen to your own common sense. If something is too good to be true, it probably is.

– If someone whom you’ve never met or heard of emails you out of the blue through Zillow with an immediate offer for your home, chances are it’s fraud. Does that ever happen in real life? Not really.

– If someone claiming to be something incredible, like the daughter of the late Oil Minister of Gambia, wants to invest with you on the basis of your attractive home photos, chances are it’s fraud. Does that ever happen in real life? Not really.

Finally, if you’re still suspicious, use Zillow Advice as a resource. People frequently ask other forumites about suspicious emails. Odds are high that other people have received similar messages. By following all these steps, you can have safe and enjoyable time on Zillow.

Frustration with an unresponsive Zestimate® home value is one of the most hotly debated complaints among Zillow users. You, the homeowner, have spent months and thousands of dollars updating your home. You’ve added landscaping, a fern-filled fishy paradise, and even a pool — but your Zestimate’s still flat. Why won’t Zillow update your Zestimate to reflect all your improvements? Why doesn’t Zillow care? These fish are tropical!

The critics are on to something. Zillow’s Zestimate is a great place to start when investigating the value of a property. But Zillow relies on homeowners themselves to update their home facts. General updates to the home facts, such as square footage changes, can affect the Zestimate. But if a homeowner has done grand renovations, or if they feel their property page still isn’t reflecting the value they feel it should, we steer them towards an extremely powerful Zillow tool: My Estimator.

The “My Estimator” tool, aka the Homeowner’s Estimate tool, is an unbelievably cool way to show the world what your home is worth with all the improvements you’ve made. If your home has a Zestimate, then you can create your own estimate. To get started:

1. Log in to Zillow

2. Go to your home’s actual home details page. Make sure you’ve claimed your home.

3. Click the My Estimate: [Create] button underneath your Zestimate at the top of the page, and begin!

Your Estimate starts with a baseline value of your Zestimate, and then lets you input all the improvements you’ve made. Then, you can add in comps, even additional comments. This is especially great for sellers, because it can help explain the difference between the Zestimate and the for-sale price. It’s all fairly intuitive and if you need additional help, here’s another link to the explanatory video. Just don’t forget to make your homeowner’s estimate public, so people can see your home’s value with all your updates.

Now visitors to your property on Zillow will get the whole story — Zillow’s Zestimate, and your homeowner’s estimate, too. Try it today.

It’s every agent’s nightmare scenario.

Your listings are on Zillow, but when you go to an individual property page there’s a stranger under ‘For Sale By Agent.’ A different name. A different contact number. Or your name, but a weird picture and incorrect contact details. And to make matters worse, the listing doesn’t show up under [My Zillow > Listings]. Is someone stealing your listings? Is Zillow broken? Do you have a doppelganger?!

… probably not. Most of the time the problem is a data mismatch in a listings feed. But getting the right agent/Zillow account on the right property is easy to do, manually. Rachel Rosen has mentioned this several times in Zillow Advice, but here’s another quick primer.

1. Log in to Zillow.

2. Go to the Home Details Page of the listing you want to claim. Either enter the address or find it in your My Zillow section.

2b. Make sure you are looking at the property’s actual page on Zillow — not the search-map popup balloon. If you see the home in the popup balloon, click on that link to get to the actual property page. Are you looking at the Home Details Page now? It’s the one with a For-Sale Price, photos, maybe some owner’s facts. Excellent.

3. Look at the left-hand side of the screen, in the “Tools” area that has icons with text (screenshot). The third or fourth option should be FLAG THIS LISTING. It’ll have a white surrender flag next to it.

4. In the popup box, click the drop-down menu and select Incorrect Listing Agent.

5. You should be automatically redirected to a followup page that has several options. Select the one that best fits your scenario. 

6. If you click Take over this listing, you’ll be redirected again to a page that looks a lot like the screen you see when you’re posting a new listing. Double check that all the info is correct, then post!

If you follow these instructions, your listings should appear under your account as normal. Enjoy!

> See Zillow FAQs for more popular Q&As.

With an average of more than 8 million unique users a month, Zillow is one of the most popular real estate media companies on the Web. And like other media companies, folks jam our phones approach us with all sorts of questions, comments and complaints. We have to cherry pick our responses like a newspaper or magazine does. But that doesn’t mean we don’t respond: Zillow has numerous “customer service” resources just a mouse click away.

Zillow Advice

Zillow Advice is Zillow’s best “customer service” resource. This magical kingdom of knowledge and assistance comes from our thousands-strong Zillow Advice community, many of whom, like NTETS, Pasadenan or Sunnyview, have been with Zillow for years.

Searching Zillow Advice is simple, too: just click the [Advice] tab and search for your question. You’ll find common and semicommon issues such as ‘I hate my zestimate’, and ‘How do I correct home info?’ and more. It’s also a great resource for general real estate information, like advice on how to stage a home. On top of this, Zillow employees haunt the forums looking for questions to answer. Try posting, and if the community can’t answer it for you, chances are a Zillowite will.

This is just the tip of the iceberg – Zillow Advice is a thriving marketplace of information, and there’s no hold music to deal with. Just type in your question and hit “Go.”

Zillow FAQs

Awhile back, someone clever made a catchall page for some of the most popular Zillow questions. As an added bonus, many are replete with videos featuring a young David Gibbons with hair. True story.

Zillow Videos

Zillow has quite a collection of training videos and you can find most of these on YouTube, too. If you’d like to look just at Zillow’s videos without any related threads or commentary, check us out.

There are many more channels to explore, but Zillow Advice is the absolute best way to get your questions answered. Just be sure to always search and see if the question has been answered before – trust me, it has.

Stung by courtroom defeats, increasing activist pressure and financial woes from a deflated real estate market, Tishman Speyer Properties (TSP) today announced that it was effectively “surrendering” Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village to its creditors.

For those who may not remember, TSP acquired the gigantic 110-building complex in 2006 for the princely sum of $5.4 billion, making it the largest real estate transaction in American history.

Stuy Town and PC Village were originally built after World War II in a clever bid to lure middle-class American GIs and their families to NYC. Today, both complexes are mini-cities of their own with multi-generational families occupying the spacious (5BRs!), rent-controlled units and owning or working in nearby businesses. TSP’s 2006 purchase was seen by critics as a blow to one of NYC’s last redoubts of solidly middle-class housing.

Tenants and affordable-housing groups immediately set to work fighting TSP’s efforts to de-regulate some of the units and ease in rent hikes. The battle culminated in an October 2009 court ruling that declared TSP “improperly began charging market rents on thousands of apartments” while collecting a reported $24 million in tax breaks for building renovation.

Things spiraled downwards from there. Improvements were made but TSP was legally unable to raise the rent on most of the apartments and had major difficulties renting newly available units. Meanwhile, the housing bubble burst and demand for real estate softened all over NYC, further eroding rental prices. Earlier this month, TSP even defaulted on $3 billion in debt and was actively pursuing debt restructuring.

What this means for the iconic complex and its tenants remains to be seen, though this certainly doesn’t come as a surprise to critics of the 2006 buyout. What do you think?

> See East Village homes for sale

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