It’s come to my attention recently that neighborhoods are the new battleground in the real estate industry. 2006 was more about listings, now it’s a matter of supporting the value of those listings with statistics to back up the listing data and provide consumers with the full picture.

There are many new websites out there targeting consumers looking for useful information on specific neighborhoods. Most of these new websites have launched over the past year. Here are the few that I know about.

• Neighboroo.com
• Localism.com
• NeighborhoodMatch.com
• City-Data.com (been around awhile and very 1.0)

These websites are a mix between general demographics, statistics and Realtor feedback. None have hit the nail on the head just yet. I say “Yet” because I believe they are traveling on the right track, but haven’t quite made it to the complete solution that consumers need to learn more about each neighborhood.

The success of these sites will be built on their ability to provide unique and relevant information for each neighborhood and to display it in simple organized manner that consumers can first find and then use to quickly determine which are the better neighborhoods to live.

The questionsbecomes…Which one of these sites will deliver on what the consumers need? Will Localism simply become an agent marketing tool or a consumer neighborhood tool or both? Will Neighboroo eventually go beyond killer maps and data mashups? Will NeighborhoodMatch be developed further into a destination portal with up to date listings and complete neighborhood data? Which one of these sites will win the search engine battle?

We’ll have to wait to find out. At this point the playing field is wide open with plenty of opportunities for each of these websites to win the Neighborhood Wars. Who will go into 2008 as the winner?

There’s been plenty of chatter concerning the relevancy of Zillow and how credible their Zestimates truly are. I’ve always believed their results gave us a good range of value…but I would never list a home based on a Zestimate. I don’t know many agents who would.

Well I had an interesting experience with Zillow this morning. My older Brother and Sister asked me to look up a home for a friend so they could get a gauge of the homes value. So being my busy/lazy self I took a minute to do a zestimate on it and found the house to be around $275-$280K. So I forwarded the link onto my brother and sister for their information. Immediately, they both emailed me back and asked for the actual sales over the past 2 years. They certainly weren’t going to trust the Zestimate. They wanted hard factual evidence of the homes value from the county recorder…not some basic AVM result from a website.

Now knowing they were serious about their inquiry, I had to go the extra mile(hardly) to get this information. After a quick few minutes of actual research I found several sales that Zillow didn’t include on their site. (Gasp!) Now we’re looking at a sale closer to the $300,000 instead of $275,000. Not a big difference, so it was definately within the 10% variable range that Lloyd Frink claimed at Inman last week. (By the way, 10% in Real Estate is huge).

I guess my whole point is that the real test of time for Zillow will be that they have to convince the public that a Zestimate is the actual value of the home. A consumer shouldn’t have to go to another website or ask a Realtor for this information…it should just be on the Zillow website.

Their long term credibility will hinder on their ability to convince all of us that their Zestimates are 100% accurate. If they don’t, I predict Zillow will become a novelty more than a significant industry force.