If you have looked for a house in the last ten years or if you’re just interested in checking out houses on the internet, odds are you have heard of Zillow.
Now, Zillow is no longer just an online platform for browsing available homes or for creeping on the value of your neighbor’s house.
The company has started buying, fixing up and selling homes itself through a new division called “Zillow offers.”
It announced the new feature aimed at streamlining the process for homeowners considering selling to the site.
The “zestimate”, the online estimate of the home’s value, will now represent an initial cash offer from the company to buy the property meaning an even quicker timeline for homeowners looking to close a sale without going through the hassle of a formal listing, or a source of helpful data for would-be sellers who want to know how much money they’ll have to buy their next house.
For Zillow this new feature is just the latest step in transforming itself from a hub for online real estate data to what it’s calling “Zillow 2.0,” a one-stop-shop for home searching, buying and selling.
The reality site also offers connections to nearby real estate agents, as well as home loans.
Zestimate initial cash offers will be available in 23 markets to start.
For a growing set of properties in those markets, Zillow has enough data on the home and others like it that it feels confident making the Zestimate its initial cash offer.
For homeowners who decline the cash offer, the difference between Zillow’s offer and what they end up selling for is typically less than one percent.