Google Trends for Finance … this is for real estate.

A few years ago I wrote a story titled What if Zillow is Right?.  Replace "Zillow" with "Google".

Yet I have been wondering – what if Zillow’s reach becomes so great, their data become so vast and inclusive, that their Zestimates significantly impact what is fair market value? What if the purchasing and selling population refer to Zillow as the end-all, be-all estimator for their homes’ valuations? What if “close enough” is “good enough”? What if they become the de facto standard for home valuations?

Perfection with regards to a property’s valuation is a fluid thing, a moving target dependent on the “right” buyer who is ready, willing and able.

Can their data aggregation ever mitigate and/or minimize sufficiently the potential impacts of those unzillowable features? Doubtful, but they may be able to minimize the impact of the data’s shortcoming, provided they are accurate elsewhere. Might Zillow become just another tool used by Realtors?

Fast forward to early 2008 – Zillow might be right(er).

Realtors’ complacency and dependence on the MLS will be their downfall … Zillow, et. al. “get” that the data needs to be accurate; many Realtors don’t. Here’s a thought – what if Zillow starts charging Realtors for access?

I think that the theories I applied then could very readily be applied to Google for Real Estate. Google could define the real estate market – even the Charlottesville real estate market, as relatively small as we are. With their local search and unfathomable data content/aggregation/analysis, is it unreasonable to think this is feasible?

With the Dow Jones overlay for comparison: