While Zillow.com is still in its beta stage (and has been since January 2006), the look and feel of the site is easy to follow, yet banal. To its credit, there isn’t a dearth of information to visually and mentally wade through. Graphically, however, the few images used on the site very much resemble something from a clipart collection. There is even a headline on the splash page exclaiming “Cool Maps and Images!” leaving the feeling that someone’s 12-year-old wrote the copy.

Zillow also falls into the habit of cutesy naming—in their case, items all beginning with the letter “Z.” There are Zestimate, Zestimator and Zindex – all of which, of course, are trademarked and all of which are site features as opposed to products or services. For the amount of money, time and resources required to create, register and enforce trademarks, one assumes that Zillow’s resources could have been better spent on improving its visuals and copywriting.

Once a street address is entered, the user is automatically routed to an interactive map that is a photographic aerial view of the property and surrounding houses with home values (aka the Zestimate) graphically overlaid each neighboring home.

A click on any house reveals details such as the valuation range and averaged value, square footage, number of bedrooms, baths, year built, heating and cooling information and other pertinent facts. The source of these so-called “facts” is public records such as the local county assessor’s office. The site does acknowledge that many of the “facts” are outdated or incomplete, and that homeowners will have the opportunity to update that information themselves in the future. A quick search of a known single family home and surrounding neighbors’ homes revealed both incomplete and inaccurate facts including the number of bedrooms omitted. Some states, including Indiana, Texas and Louisiana, cannot be accessed through the site due to state nondisclosure laws.

The Zestimator feature allows a user to modify “the facts” used to calculate the original value estimate and does an instantaneous value adjustment based on home improvements and other outstanding features or things in need of repair/improvement. A greater than average attention span is required to wade through the process, which ultimately ends with housing comps based on the final valuation figure, which the site claims is within 10 percent of the market value.

Zillow isn’t the only free, proprietary online real estate site. RealEstateABC.com offers comparable functionality with a few extra features, and similar sites are sure to emerge.

Yahoo! Real Estate announced in late July that Zillow would be incorporated into its site as an added functionality tool, and at least one major real estate brokerage, Prudential California/Nevada Realty, announced the incorporation of Zillow within its own website.