Housing start-up Zillow just released a new product, Rent Zestimates, which will provide estimated rent prices for 90 million homes on both its website and all its mobile apps.
Seattle-based Zillow provides online real-estate price estimates and acts as a marketplace for renters, buyers and sellers.
According to the 2009 American Housing Survey from the U.S. Census, 70 percent of people who move each year are renters, making Zillow&'s foray into the rental market a potential cash cow.
Of those renters, a recent survey by housing research think-tank Ipsos found that two-thirds of renters do not research what is a fair rental price before they sign their lease.
Zillow said it hopes to change that by offering あRent Zestimates&' estimated rent prices on specific homes or apartments, thereby leveling the playing field to make sure consumers aren&'t paying too much for their new rental.
The company saidあRent Zestimates will appear in search bubbles on homes available to rent, and on the main details page for nearly every home on Zillow, whether ita4ぎa4г on the market or not.
It currently has close to 300,000 apartments and homes listed for rent and consumers can search listings by number of bedrooms and bathrooms, square footage and monthly payment.
Users can find Rent Zestimates on map searches and individual home detail pages on Zillow.com and all Zillow mobile applications, including iPhone, iPad and Android apps.
a4ぎABuyers and renters are not exclusive categories a4ぎa4 many people are considering both options when shopping for a new home. Similarly, many would-be sellers in todaya4ぎa4г housing market are considering whether to become landlords rather than sell at a loss,a4ぎ said Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff. a4ぎAWe created Rent Zestimates to empower people with information and data to make the right real estate decision for them.a4ぎ
The company is also hoping to catch the eye of landlords who are intending to move out sometime in the next three years, helping them determine a fair price to charge when they do rent out their homes.
Zillow&'s offerings are widespread:あIt took over all of Yahoo&'s real estate listings in July and launched mobile apps in March of last year.
But it still faces stiff competition from other online home finders such as Trulia, which announced in January that it had teamed up with international home lister ListGlobally to begin offering rentals and houses for sale in 17 countries worldwide.
For now, however, Zillow remains the leader in the space.
The company said that currently Zillow Mobile apps are used 6.5 million times each month, with more than 23 million visits to home detail pages &8211'the equivalent of 32,000 home views every hour, or close to nine home views a second.
It also logged more than 13 million unique users in December, a year-over-year traffic growth of 77 percent.
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Companies: ipsos, Trulia, Yahoo, Zillow
People: Spencer Rascoff
Companies: ipsos, Trulia, Yahoo, Zillow
People: Spencer Rascoff
Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum Markets Media, which she joined in 2008 from Dow Jones/MarketWatch in New York. Her work has appeared in the The New York Times, the Associated Press, Portfolio Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Barrona4ぎa4г. She has won awards from the American Society of Business Publishers and Editors, the Magazine Association of the Southeast, the Mississippi Press Association and the Atlanta Press Club, and was a finalist for the Pacemaker Prize for excellence in news reporting.
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