e-Valuation: Find the value without the valuation?
A new service has just launched in the U.S. that allows people to quickly and easily get a estimate of the value of any house in the country. Taking in moutains of data the website predicts the value based on tax record and historical data. While not a official valuation, it is a free service and will no doubt be useful to many home owners. I was amazed when I was able to zoom down to a house and see its value and the value of those surrounding it. Then by clicking you get detailed price estimate and associated accuracy as well as other information, like how many bedrooms the property has.
According to this report, Zillow has received USD $32 Million in venture capital funding. Not bad at all! It just goes to show that machine learning and data mining are going to be more and more important in the future. For further reading see John Cook’s blog for a good commentary on Zillow and it’s recent VC success.