Zillow Launches Neighborhood Pages

Posted on July 12, 2007

Zillow's extensive data about homes nationwide has made it a very popular resource. Now John Cook's Venture Blog reports that Zillow will be incorporating citizen journalism features into its popular real estate website. They are starting with community webpages for 6,500 neighborhoods in the U.S.

In a way, Zillow is attempting to combine its real estate data with the citizen journalism movement, encouraging people who live in select neighborhoods to upload photos, events, news and other information.
The idea is that people will not only visit Zillow to learn about homes, but -- one could imagine -- local restaurants, recent crimes or the history of the neighborhood. With this feature, you could also see Zillow moving down the path of trying to link people together in certain neighborhoods to share a lawnmower, sell a grill, host a fundraiser or, perhaps, find a date. And if that occurs, the real estate information and Zestimates offered by Zillow today might just be a Trojan horse into other lucrative advertising markets.

Zillow neighborhood pages are already live. On the Fremont, Seattle neighborhood page there are over 200 neighbors, dozens of photos and a comment about the Fremont neighborhood from user SarahSeattle. Yes, SarahSeattle works for Zillow in PR but it does give you an idea of how Zillow's neighborhood feature will work.

BackFence is closing as Zillow is zeroing in on social networking and citizen journalism. Zillow has already established itself in the real estate niche so maybe this will help keep them above water long enough to get the neighborhood journalism features working as well. It seems logical that if you are going to be providing data about homes and neighborhoods that you also offer some local neighborhood news. Another advantage Zillow has is that people like to use Zillow to check out the values of other homes in their neighborhood. If they run into these local neighborhood comments and photos while they are spying on the values of their neighbor's homes it might encourage them to join in and contribute comments and upload photos of their own. Even if they don't contribute any content they may still return more frequently to Zillow to spy on their neighbor's comments and photos.