Real Estate Blog

Season four of the The Hills premiered last night, and for all of us closet Hills fans, it didn’t disappoint.

This season opened with a pool party at LC’s house for Audrina. As I’ve blogged about in the past, this house has been the source of much friendship melodrama. While I didn’t get an invite to the shindig, using Zillow’s Bird’s Eye View functionality, I can at least see the pool where the action went down.

Another Hills party that I didn’t to attend, but can stalk online, went down earlier this week when the crew headed over to the Project Beach House (a sponsored beach house for celebs to hang out at during the summer) for an exclusive party and taping session. You can read about the filming of this “reality” show by this lucky blogger that did get to attend. The home sits on 5 acres of land and overlooks the Pacific Ocean and El Matador State Beach in Malibu. Oh the glamour life those Hills girls lead!

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Reality TV update: Million Dollar Listing, Season 2, Episode 1 “Sellers From Hell”

Madison, the self-proclaimed “King of Malibu,” used Zillow to prepare for his listing presentation and secure one of the biggest listings of his career during the season premier of his reality TV show Million Dollar Listing, which appears on Bravo.

Madison is a high-end real estate agent in Malibu, CA and has sold more than $80 million in celebrity real estate (and he’s not even 30!). His most recent celebrity listing: Karen Pankow’s Malibu mansion (ex-wife of James Pankow, trombonist from Chicago).

Pankow’s pad is located at 3874 Puerco Canyon, Malibu, CA 90265 and is listed at a cool $4,385,000. (See more Malibu, CA real estate).

Much to our delight, Madison is an active contributor on Zillow (agent screen name “900624lead100457964”) with 6 listings for sale. Hey Madison, thanks for the shout out and for using Zillow!

Million Dollar Listing airs Tuesdays at 10/9C on Bravo.

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I spend a fair amount of time speaking with Web developers around the country, and one thing I have heard numerous times is that they’d like to be able to access data on homes for sale via the Zillow API. I have good news — now you can!

We recently added two new API calls — GetRegionPostings and GetUpdatedPropertyDetails.

The combination of these two new calls provides a way for real estate agents and brokerages to integrate for sale by owner listings directly into their listing search functionality. We’re happy to have Redfin as an early adopter (Redfin blog post) of FSBO listings in the markets it covers. Here’s an example of a FSBO listing from Zillow on Redfin (here’s the same listing on Zillow).

Zillow is a living, growing database of all homes — not just homes for sale (we currently have data on more than 80 million homes). More than 1.3 million owners have claimed their homes on Zillow and many have updated their home facts. While we are storing those updated home facts in our databases, we think it’s only fair that we allow individuals to use the data they input into Zillow on their own Web sites, if they wish. This is where the GetUpdatedPropertyDetails API call comes into play. Have a Make Me Move price on your home and want to easily show it off? Now it’s possible. Or, have a listing that you want to automatically display within your own Web site or blog? That’s possible as well.

The GetRegionPostings API takes a place (ZIP code, neighborhood, or even geo points) as an input and returns a count of listings by type (Make Me Move, for sale by agent, for sale by owner, and reported for sale) in addition to some home facts about each property returned. The attributes of each property that are returned are home type, beds, baths, square footage, lot size, and price — along with a count of how many images are available for that property and a link to the home details page on Zillow. If you’d like to have access to the GetRegionPostings API call, please let us know.

Realius is another innovator that has adopted our postings API in the New York Metro market as part of their Price Me Now game - you can try it out here. For those looking to learn more about adding Zillow content to your site, take a look at our API documentation — and don’t forget those mortgage rate widgets that are highly clickable and addictive!

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Opening up the Zillow API to Allow Sites in the API Network to Access Homes for Sale

Vanity Fair, which likes to tweak U.S. President George W. Bush any way it can, has started a “George W. Bush Crawford Ranch Sale Countdown.” In doing some quick office math (thanks, Mary!), it looks like this VF countdown will put Bush’s Crawford, TX, home on the market in the middle of June, 2009.

Rumors have been heating up that the prez — love him or hate him — will sell the ranch because his wife,

Laura, wants to live in a town that has more than one traffic light and a public

library. Evidently, reports have placed Laura’s top choice to be Highland Park, which is a suburb of Dallas and about a two-hour drive north of their Crawford ranch. Laura, if you’re interested in Highland Park, TX real estate, you’ll see it’s quite affordable with a Zindex of $90K (at this writing).

Check out some interesting satellite imagery of Bush’s Crawford ranch. Evidently, he did a lot of work to the property, known as the Prairie Creek Ranch, after buying it for $1.3 million from the Engelbrecht family in 1999.

Even Dallas Dirt is speculating that W is looking into a Dallas office. Oh, where will they land?

Read more here:
Bush Countdown: Sale of Crawford Ranch

Last week, we released our Q2 2008 Real Estate Market Reports, in which we reported that, nationwide, 29.1% of homeowners who purchased in the past five years are currently underwater on their mortgages (i.e., owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth). We also reported that almost half (45%) of those that bought at the national market peak of 2006 currently have negative equity. The first chart below shows the number of homes with negative equity as a percentage of homes sold in each of the last five years (broken out by region). As you can see, homeowners buying in the West at the 2006 peak have been hit the hardest with almost 60% of purchasers in that year upside down currently on their mortgage.

After doing a bit more number-crunching, we’re able now to report these numbers as a percentage of all homes, not just homes sold in a given period. The numbers are even more startling than we expected with almost 14% of all single-family homes in the U.S., regardless of when they were bought, currently in negative equity. That’s one in seven single-family homes in the country underwater right now. The second chart below breaks these numbers out by region as well. Here, the impact of significant market declines in California, Las Vegas and Phoenix are evident in negative equity rates in the West which top 18 percent (almost one in five homes underwater). The lowest rates of negative equity are found in the Northeast with only about 6 percent of homes underwater.

In an earlier analysis at the beginning of this year, Moody’s Economy.com reported rates of negative equity at the time of about 10 percent with a projection for rates to near 14 percent by the end of Q2. Indeed, it does appear that we’ve hit those levels as indicated by our own numbers. With negative equity being a factor in foreclosure rates, these numbers are just one more reminder of the severe strain being felt by many homeowners right now.

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Look Around: One in Seven is Underwater

The 104th edition of the Carnival of Real Estate is posted at Altos Research. In honor of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Mike Simonsen put together a fantastic carnival with an Olympic theme by highlighting 7 posts — head on over and take a look!

The carnival will make its next appearance on Monday, Aug. 25 on ValleyMarket.com. Please submit your best post by Sunday, Aug. 24, to be considered. Are you a real estate blogger and would you like to host a future edition? If so, get instructions on how to do so here. Please check the complete FAQ list if you have other questions as to how to participate.

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Carnival of Real Estate #104

If you visit Zillow today using your iPhone Safari, Blackberry, Opera Mobile or other mobile browser, you will notice something different. The mobile homepage. That’s because we just launched a mobile browser version of our popular home search feature making it easier and faster to search properties from your hand held device.

Our goal: To speed things up and improve the mobile user experience. To make this all possible we put together a lightweight search interface that should be easy to use on mobile devices. Built by myself and designer Adam Ebel, we intentionally kept it simple. Just enter the address and press “GO”. If we find an exact match for your search, you’ll see a home details page which will tell you:

• Zestimate
• Number of beds
• Number of baths
• Square footage
• Sale price
• Homes for sale/Recently Sold/Make Me Move status
• Photos
• Seller and owner added facts
• Zestimate history graphs
• An inline static Google Map of the home’s location
• Links to view the home details page on Zillow (and for iPhone users, on the built-in Google Maps)

During your visit, you’ll be able to use links to switch between the mobile site and the main site, so virtually all of Zillow is viewable, and finding homes using the address search feature is a snap.

Feedback and requests for future versions are much appreciated. Feel free to e-mail me at davidgo@zillow.com.

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In a magnanimous act, real estate developer Donald Trump is rescuing Ed McMahon from foreclosure by buying McMahon’s home and leasing it back to him, according to the L.A. Times. As The Donald put it,

“When I was at the Wharton School of Business,” Trump said, “I’d watch him every night. How could this happen?”

Now that Ed is saved from foreclosure, what about other celebrities facing foreclosure?

Read more here:

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CAR HIRE & TRANSFERS

<span class=”field_caption”>Full Description</span>:&nbsp;Car hire & Transfers with mini vans or estates vehicles.<br />
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CAR HIRE & TRANSFERS

<span class=”field_caption”>Full Description</span>:&nbsp;Car hire & Transfers with mini vans or estates vehicles.<br />
Private trips with driver & English speaking guide, from 50€ per day. All destinations.<br />
Rent a mini van or limousine from 15€ per day.<br />

View original here:
CAR HIRE & TRANSFERS

<span class=”field_caption”>Full Description</span>:&nbsp;Car hire & Transfers with mini vans or estates vehicles.<br />
Private trips with driver & English speaking guide, from 50€ per day. All destinations.<br />
Rent a mini van or limousine from 15€ per day.<br />

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CAR HIRE & TRANSFERS

Swimmer Natalie Coughlin from Vallejo, California (Photo courtesy Al Bello/Getty Images)

Many of us here at Zillow have been cheering on the U.S. team in the Beijing Olympics this week. Which got us thinking, which state do you think has the highest number of Olympians? If you guessed California, you’re right. In fact, California wins by a mile — of the nearly 600 athletes that make up Team USA, 166 have hometowns in California. (The second-highest state, Texas, trails with 43 athletes.) Holy moly, there must be something in the water!

Of course, California also has the highest population of any state, so maybe that’s the difference. But that doesn’t explain why California has almost 4 times the number of athletes as Texas, which has nearly two-thirds the population of California.

Which city has Olympic bragging rights? According to this U.S. Olympians hometown list, that would be sunny San Diego. Seven Olympians call San Diego their hometown, closely followed by Irvine, California, with 6 athletes.

Go here to read the rest:
California Takes the Gold for Most Olympians

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The rest is here:
CAR HIRE & TRANSFERS

<span class=”field_caption”>Full Description</span>:&nbsp;Car hire & Transfers with mini vans or estates vehicles.<br />
Private trips with driver & English speaking guide, from 50€ per day. All destinations.<br />
Rent a mini van or limousine from 15€ per day.<br />

CAR HIRE & TRANSFERS