Wow, I bet heads are rolling somewhere in Seattle today. Zillow.com launched today (more here), complete with $32 million and 75 employees, and what do we get for that? A nice big outage message. I’ll say it again, wow! $32 million and you can’t run a load test?

Zillow promises to be able value your home for you, which is an interesting idea. I’m in the middle of buying and selling a house so I was really excited to try it out. I managed to get in to value my house and Zillow valued it about 10% under what we just sold it for. But, considering the market these days, I don’t think that’s too terrible. With the lack of comps for our neighborhood, I doubt an agent would have done much better (we sold by owner). I didn’t get a chance to value the house I’m buying, but hopefully will soon, if they can come back online.

I will definitely keep an eye on it, though, because this would be a great tool for NetworthIQ users to be able to value their real estate. I wonder if Zillow will have an API at some point we could tie into?

Update

It’s back up now. The house we’re buying comes up less than 1% under what we paid. Not bad. According to Zillow we’re selling for 10% more than our house is worth and buying for 1% more than the house is worth. Aren’t we the dealmakers 😉 (of course it never feels like it when you’re paying as much as houses cost these days)

Tags: zillow