Through a licensing partnership with Microsoft, Zillow has added the low-angled Birdseye aerial photography to its "Zestimate" views of local properties. Real Estate is the vertical in which dynamic mapping has the most immediate and practical impact. And Zillow has jumped ahead of other sites in offering Birdseye. The "dual view" (satellite + Birdseye) is their own innovation and I believe very helpful for would-be buyers.
The satellite view is nice but Birdseye offers meaningful visual information about the neighborhood, the style of the house, the lot, etc.
Zillow currently doesn't have listings (a missing piece in my view), but they do have advertisers. When I first took a briefing from them before launch all they had was AdSense, which is not a business model. But very quickly — quicker than expected in some respects — they have their own advertisers and a range of different types of ad inventory.
If and when Zillow can add for sale listings the site will jump quickly to the top tier of real estate destinations. Until then it remains a helpful and novel tool — because people are checking out what their neighbors' homes are worth — for sellers and buyers looking for pricing information (though the accuracy of their Zestimates has been criticized, but it getting better).
Earlier this year, Zillow received $32 million in venture capital money from Benchmark Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures.
________
Here's more from Eric Auchard of Reuters and the Zillow blog.
