ZILLOW Zillow.com is an online, web-based real estate site helping homeowners, b

Question

ZILLOW

Zillow.com is an online, web-based real estate site helping homeowners, buyers, seller, renters, real estate agents, mortgage professionals, property owners, and property managers find and share information about real estate and mortgages. Zillow allows users to access, anonymously and free of charge, the kinds of tools and information previously reserved for real estate professionals. Zillow’s databases cover more than 90 million homes, which represents 95 percent of the homes in the United States. Adding to the sheer size of its databases, Zillow recalculates home valuations for each property every day, so it can provide historical graphs on home valuations over time. In some areas, Zillow is able to display 10 years of valuation history, a value-added benefit for many of its customers. This collection of data represents an operational data warehouse for anyone visiting the site. As soon as Zillow launched its website, it immediately generated a massive amount of traffic. As the company expanded its services, the founders knew the key to its success would be the site’s ability to process and manage massive amounts of data quickly, in real time. The company identified a need to accessible, scalable, reliable, secure databases that would enable it to continue to increase the capacity of its infrastructure indefinitely without sacrificing performance. Zillow’s traffic continues to grow despite the weakened real estate market; the company is experiencing annual traffic growth of 30 percent, and about a third of all U.S. mortgage professionals visit the site in a given month.

DATA MINING AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Zestimate values on Zillow use data-mining features for spotting trends across property valuations. Data mining also allows the company to see how accurate Zestimate values are over time. Zillow has also built the industry’s first search by monthly payment, allowing users to find homes that are for sale and rent based on a monthly payment they can afford. Along with the monthly payment search, users can also enter search criteria such as the numbers of bedrooms or bathrooms. Zillow also launched a new service aimed at changing the way Americans shop for mortgages. Borrowers can use Zillow’s new Mortgage Marketplace to get custom loan quotes from lenders with having to give their names, addresses, phone numbers, or Social Security numbers, or field unwanted telephone calls from brokers competing for their business. Borrowers reveal their identities only after contacting the lender of their choice. The company is entering a field of established mortgage sites such as LendingTree.com and Experian Group’s LowerMyBills.com, which charge mortgage companies for borrower information. Zillow, which has an advertising model, says it does not plan to charge for leads. For mortgage companies, the anonymous leads come free; they can make a bid based on information provided by the borrower, such as salary, assets, credit score, and the type of loan. Lenders can browse borrower requests and see competing quotes from other brokers before making a bid.

QUESTIONS

1. How could the marketing department at Zillow use a data mart to help with the releases of a new product launch?

2. Categorize the five common characteristics of high-quality information and rank them in order of importance to Zillow.

3. Develop a list of some possible entities and attributes of Zillow’s mortgage database.

4. Assess how Zillow uses a data-driven website to run its business.

Explanation / Answer

1. A data mart is a subset of data warehouse information, such as which properties are selling best at this time. Using data mart, the marketing department at Zillow can determine the properties that are selling the best currently. This information is highly valuable for the marketing department as it gets enabled to create contacts, such as email lists to customers looking for these types of properties. A data mart could help the marketing department focus the marketing function to specific customers.

2. Individuals ultimately make decisions about the property or mortgage; however, high-quality information can provide a base for the decision. According to Baltzan (2012), the five common characteristics of high-quality information are accurate, complete, consistent, timely, and unique. The five characteristics of high-quality information can be ranked in the following order:

a. Accurate, incorrect information can lead to a potential buyer making an incorrect decision.

b. Timely, to be helpful information needs to be provided in a timely manner. Old and outdated information does not help the buyer and receiving old information might cause the website user to go to a different website to obtain more timely information. Reviewing information about a house that sold yesterday does not help the homebuyer looking to buy a particular type house today.

c. Complete, the website needs to provide the full information about a property. Complete refers to a value missing from the entity information. Baltzan (2012) provides the example asking is the address complete, that is does the address include the number, street, city, state, and zip code.

d. Unique, is each event or transaction only listed once in the information? Having a database where the data element is listed multiple times would lead to a customer receiving duplicate entries.

e. Consistent, using the same query customers can expect to receive the same information. Customers need to be able to rely on the system to provide the same results time after time and not receive different results at different times.

3. An entity, known also as a table (Baltzan, 2012), stores information about a home or mortgage and could be the sales history of a particular real estate property. Attributes are data elements that are associated with an entity (Baltzan, 2012). Attributes for the entity mortgage are the quantitative variables of selling price, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, distance to a particular location such as a school or church, address of the house, square footage of the house, garage, number of cars that will fit in a garage, and Style of house.

4. Websites should change depending on the type of information a user request. Different user request different information depending on their needs. Visitors to a website are looking for current up to date information. Zillow is considered a data driven website. Baltzan (2012) stated, “A data-driven website is an interactive website kept constantly updated and relevant to the needs of the customers using a database” (p. 215). Availability of real estate can change quickly, for Zillow to remain competitive the information from the Zillow website must remain current.

References

Applegate, L., Austin, R., & Soule, D. (2008). Corporate Information Strategy and Management: Text and Cases (8th Ed.). New York, NY. McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.

Baltzan, P. (2012). Business driven information systems (3rd ed.). New York, NY. McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.

Cherif, E., & Grant, D. (2014). Analysis of e-business models in real estate. Electronic Commerce Research, 14(1), 25-50. doi: 10.1007/s10660-013-9126-z

Fullilove, M. T., & Chaudhury, N. (2016). Keep the whole city in mind. American Journal of Public Health, 106(4), 639-641. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2015.303027

Mayer, C., Morrison, E., Piskorski, T., & Gupta, A. (2014). Mortgage modification and strategic behavior: Evidence from a legal settlement with countrywide. The American Economic Review, 104(9), 2830-2857. doi: 10.1257/aer.104.9.2830

Swango, D. L. (2015). Resources for Real Estate Analysts and Values: Searchable Database Websites. Appraisal Journal, 83(3), 237-246.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse Z
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.