Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

Zillow Real Estate Service Goes Mobile

By

Upstart real estate valuation site Zillow has caused a few waves, first with its “what the heck is it?” marketing launch, then inking a deal with Yahoo to provde home valuations in Yahoo Real Estate listings. Basically, the idea behind Zillow is to provide real estate investors and home buyers with estimates—er, Zestimates—of a property’s market value, along with other key information about the property which is otherwise available but time-consuming to collect. Zillow then plugs the numbers into a proprietary formula and offers its best guess about the value of a property. Some people love Zillow; some people hate it; you can generally guess from their reactions where Zillow’s estimates fell in relation to their own personal assessment of the property’s value.

Now Zillow’s gone and gone, well, mobile. Zillow‘s own blog entry says it all: “I was strolling around Capitol Hill a while back and saw a pretty sweet house I was interested in. How much was it worth? How big was it? The information was out there, but I had to wait until I got home before I could look it up. That’s when it occurred to me… people should be able to get this information on the go.”

Recommended Videos

Zillow Mobile works via text message: use a cell phone to send a text message to z@labs.zillow.com with the address of the house you’d like to check out (no special formatting is required). Zillow replies with the home’s address, estimated value, number of bedrooms, numbers of baths, square footage, and year built. It should be noted that all these numbers are estimates or culled from records which may vary in accuracy: the deets could be correct, or they could be…otherwise. Plugging my current address into Zillow turns up incorrect square footage and year built; the home where I grew up seems to have lost about a third of its size and a bedroom; the house next door has gained a bathroom. But we’re sure it’s fun!

Editors' Recommendations

Geoff Duncan
Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
T-Mobile goes down: What caused Monday’s outage
T-Mobile storefront with corporate signage.

Thousands of T-Mobile subscribers reported outages across the United States on Monday afternoon as a routing issue knocked out service for huge swaths of the country.

Around noon Pacific time on Monday, Down Detector showed almost 90,000 reports of a T-Mobile outage affecting most major U.S. cities. Nearly 70% of users were reporting they had lost a signal and Down Detector's outage map revealed the reports were spread across the country.

Read more
T-Mobile promises free 5G for first responders if Sprint merger goes through
T-Mobile storefront with corporate signage.

T-Mobile really wants to get the public in favor of the merger between it and Sprint. The company announced that if the merger with Sprint goes through, it will offer 10 years of free, unlimited 5G service to first responders.

The program will reportedly be called the "Connecting Heroes Initiative," and is part of a larger "5G for Good" plan that the company hopes to build. Through the program, State and local public first responders can sign up to receive coverage. Those agencies can actually sign up right now, and will get the coverage if the merger closes in the next year.

Read more
Huawei’s gorgeous Pura 70 phones just got expanded availability
Huawei Pura 70 pink, green, white, and black colors.

Huawei Pura 70 Huawei

After being announced for China in mid-April, the Huawei Pura 70 series is now confirmed for the EU market. Those in the European market can expect to preorder the Pura 70, Pura 70 Pro, and the top-tier Pura 70 Ultra starting May 2 for 999 euros, 1,199 euros, and 1,499 euros, respectively. This pricing is in line with what we saw in China, with the Ultra coming in at 9,999 yuan ($1,400) and the base Pura 70 at 5,499 yuan ($760).

Read more