Find the value of any home on your iPhone

Zillow.com is one of the most popular property portals in the US. It's model is much the same as recent UK upstart Zoopla.co.uk in that it provides data on every property, not just those that are actually for sale using an automated valuation model. It also provides agents with a pay-per-lead model for marketing properties which are actually for sale like Propertyindex.com.

Zillow's 'Zestimates' have earnt them plenty of praise for their innovation and plenty of criticism for their inaccuracy, but the appeal of having current data on every property has certainly proved popular with US homebuyers and Zillow is now the 2nd most popular US property portal. Taking this success from conventional online to the mobile marketplace was a logical step and Zillow has achieved several hundred thousand downloads of it's new iPhone application within just a few weeks. The application uses the iPhone's built in GPS to pinpoint your location and tell you the value of the properties around you. See how it works in more detail in this video...

Any good agent should be able to pick holes in a price obtained by an automated valuation model, but tech-savvy buyers are bound to use this facility to compare automated and actual asking price for peace of mind or even as a point for negotiation. Zoopla already has some fairly basic iPhone apps, but it will surely not be long before they or another of the portals bring this technology to the UK market.