Price check

As fond as they are of their three-bedroom Cambridge condominium, Tom Russell and his wife Margaret Daley know that with two young children, they'll need to move sooner or later.

"It's a nice condo, but it's not a family condo," he said. "Everyone who's ever owned it with kids has moved out."

But with the local real estate market uncertain and little free time, the couple are not eager to go through the work of selling their home and shopping for a new one. So Russell is using technology to test the market for him: He's used a service by real estate web site Zillow.com to drum up interest in their home without officially putting it up for sale.

In December, Russell and his wife placed an $800,000 price tag on their 1,200-square-foot unit using Zillow's "Make Me Move" service, a no-obligation proffer that tells prospective buyers what they'd be willing to take for their condo.

"Listing a place for sale is a big hassle. This is saying we'll entertain offers in the right range. It's a much lower involvement," Russell said.

Zillow is typical of a new generation of real estate web sites that offer gee-whiz visual appeal and much more information than just property listings and cool maps. With customers demanding more accurate information and competition heating up among sites sporting more sophisticated and powerful technology, today's real estate Web services are trying to do more of the heavy lifting around marketing and selling a property.

"Things have changed a lot," said Celia Chen, director of housing economics at Moody's Economy.com. "Ten years ago you couldn't go in and stick in a zip code to find out how many houses are for sale."

In addition to one-year-old Zillow, other sites include: Cyberhomes.com, a research and appraisal tool; Trulia.com, a real estate search engine; and Redfin.com and My-Currency.com, Web portals for buying and selling homes in select US markets .

Zillow has generated the biggest buzz. Its "Zestimate" service, which uses proprietary algorithms to calculate an individual property's valuation, was a hit on the cocktail circuit, as neighbors and acquaintances could gossip about house values.

"The goal of Zillow is to put information out there to make people smarter about real estate," said company spokeswoman Amy Bohutinsky.

A newer player is Cyberhomes.com, backed by Fidelity National Information Services, a provider of automated valuation services and software for lenders and realtors, said Marty Frame, chief information officer at Cyberhomes. Cyberhomes.com also offers detailed information about specific towns and neighborhood-level demographics, and data on schools, commute times, and other factors that affect buying decisions, Frame said.

Zillow's Make Me Move attempts to add something new to that information mix: a glimpse at the property owner's state of mind.

"We wanted a way to reach into the head of the homeowner and find out what is that magical price to hand over your keys and move," Bohutinsky said.

Locally, around 1,000 homeowners in Massachusetts have placed a Make Me Move price on their home since its launch in December. On average, those homeowners are asking around 16 percent above what Zillow estimates the house's market value to be, she said.

Still, this new generation of real estate website hasn't revolutionized home selling. Russell, for one, hasn't received a single response since he posted his offer on Zillow three months ago. Just 3 percent of Massachusetts homeowners with Make Me Move prices had been contacted by an interested buyer through Zillow's site, according to Zillow figures.

For all their sophisticated presentation, the new websites are still struggling with a common problem: how to get accurate property information, beyond what's publicly available from common sources. For example, Zillow said Russell's condo had two bedrooms and one bathroom, when in fact it has three bedrooms and two baths, and also omitted valuable off-street deeded parking. Those discrepancies accounted for much of the difference between Zillow's most recent $504,398 estimated value of Russell's Cambridge condominium and his Make Me Move price of $800,000, Russell said.

The source of those discrepancies may be the public records Zillow and other sites use; the City of Cambridge lists Russell's unit in assessing records as having one fewer bedroom and bathroom. It values the house at $431,600. Using the same data, Cyberhomes.com put a $414,810 value on the condo.

Another Cambridge resident, Terence Chesire, said Zillow had mostly accurate data about his home. He posted a Make Me Move price of $449,000, while Zillow estimated its worth at $403,000, compared with an assessed value of $370,000 from the City of Cambridge.

Like Russell, Chesire is considering moving this spring, and was using Make Me Move to dip his toes in the market. Also like Russell, he updated his home's information on Zillow before posting his Make Me Move price, adding photos of a recently remodeled kitchen with cherry cabinets and granite countertops.

Each site is pursuing its own strategy to get more -- and more accurate -- data. Homeowners improve the quality of Zillow estimates, for example, when they update their property profiles, correcting mistakes as Russell did with his Make Me Move offering, resulting in the much higher $800,000 price.

Like Zillow, Cyberhomes also allows property owners to update their own home's information and provides tools that show how much different types of improvements would boost its value .

But wide discrepancies still exist within and among websites. For example, potential home buyers interested in Chesire's Garden Street home would be understandably confused if they researched it using multiple online services. Cyberhomes.com said his condo has two bedrooms and two baths, and is worth $862,000; Zillow said it has three bedrooms and one bath, and is worth $403,000. At another service, eppraisal.com, the value of Chesire's condo is between $464,000 and $628,000.

At Cyberhomes, a recent change to the way in which the site calculates home values has caused big swings in estimates -- with homes such as Russell's jumping almost $60,000 in value in the last two months. Prices should stabilize now, and Frame said those inconsistencies should even out as the website matures. Cyberhomes is supplementing county data with property and real estate transaction information that can be gleaned from its insurance and property appraisal businesses.

Meanwhile, web sites that use property data that is hard to come by -- or "un-zillowable" -- are going to be a big trend this year, said Joel Burslem, a real estate and marketing professional who writes the FutureofRealEstateMarketing.com blog.

"You can only get so much from public data. Home valuation is ultimately a boots-on-the-ground endeavor. You have to see the home first-hand to make an accurate judgment," he said.

Indeed, Karim Tahawi, a former derivatives trader who is now chief executive of My-Currency.com, said that home estimates based only on public data and algorithms may be wrong-headed, no matter how accurate their information. His San Francisco-based company has a model that gets input from realtors, neighbors, and other community members -- sometimes termed "crowd-sourcing" -- to determine home values.

"The truth is, there's a lot more information out there about the house and the neighborhood and the street that machine-generated values don't capture. They don't know if the house next to the one you're looking at is a frat house with parties every night," Tahawi said.

For that kind of knowledge, buyers and sellers are still likely to turn to professionals to set prices and help get a deal done. Indeed, a November survey by the National Association of Realtors found that 81 percent of home buyers who searched for a home via the Internet ended up purchasing it through a real estate agent.

However, technology such as Zillow's does have potential benefits, said Chen, the Economy.com housing specialist, if it succeeds in putting buyers and sellers more directly in contact with each other.

"To the extent that it allows more exchange of information, it will keep the market more honest," she said.

Russell, meanwhile, isn't put off by the lack of response to his $800,000 Make Me Move price. He figured he and his wife will come in with a lower price when they do decide to sell the condo, though the couple doesn't expect to use a traditional realtor because he doesn't want to pay the commission.

"I see this as way for someone to let the world know that they're not parked someplace forever," Russell said. "You might as well take advantage of the resources that are out there."