Three month old Zillow, which gives people an indication of home values in specific locations based on publicly available comparables, will be having some competiton in the near future.
The new site is called Real Estate ABC (which is owned Internet Brands).
The Zillow competitor is in beta on a hidden URL: www1.realestateabc.com/home-values/. I have no idea if they’ll leave it up, but as of right now it’s live.
The name isn’t as cool and the design isn’t a fluid as Zillow, but it may be better in some ways. For instance, Real Estate ABC allows users to adjust property values for a particular property with an Ajax slider. Adjustable property factors include Interior, Exterior, Lot Size, View, Privacy/Noise and Local Market Conditions.
Users can also refine property values by adding or removing comparables directly on the results page. In fact, Real Estate ABC gives significant detail on comparables, including distance from a specific address. Real Estate ABC also provides a mashup with Google maps, although they do not use satellite images like Zillow.
Zillow is perhaps one of the most popular recent mashup to launch. If anything, Real Estate ABC shows that if a mashup site is going to try to make a go at creating a real business, they need to build in proprietary features that are not easily duplicated before the competition arrives.
