{"id":14602,"date":"2019-11-19T16:02:45","date_gmt":"2019-11-19T22:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/?p=14602"},"modified":"2019-11-19T16:02:45","modified_gmt":"2019-11-19T22:02:45","slug":"zillow-patents-zestimates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/corporate\/zillow-patents-zestimates\/","title":{"rendered":"Zillow hopes gov’t is dumb enough to grant them a patent on 30+ year old tech"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, Zillow quietly filed a patent<\/a> for \u201cautomatically determining market rental rates for properties.\u201d<\/p>\n

The patent abstract says that it\u2019s protecting \u201cA facility for determining a market rental rate for a distinguished home located in a distinguished geographic area\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

It goes on to say that they receive attributes for the home, and runs it through a valuation model trained by rental listing prices and home attributes from recently-listed rental homes in the area, then reports the market rate that it comes up with.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re familiar with Zillow, that probably means that you’re either a real estate professional, you\u2019ve used it to find a home, or<\/em> that you\u2019re one of the people who idly flips through it ogling other peoples\u2019 houses the same way that most people scroll through Twitter. But you\u2019ll probably also recognize the service being described. It sounds like it\u2019s basically a Zestimate, for rental properties.<\/p>\n

A Zestimate is a home-value estimate that Zillow offers on its listings. It pulls pricing data from similar houses in the area, runs it all through an algorithm<\/a>, spits out a rough estimate of what an appropriate price for that home might be. Better known as an AVM<\/a>, which was developed in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an interesting service. Though if you\u2019ve ever played around on the site, you\u2019ve probably noticed that the Zestimate can be way off. It\u2019s not unreliable by any means, but it\u2019s far from gospel about what a home is actually worth. The average Zestimate error for a house not currently on the market has been calculated to be around $18,000<\/a> as of July 2019. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting that Zillow<\/a> is going further down the Zestimate path. Earlier this month, they were sued by IBM<\/a> for alleged infringement of seven patents. They claim that key Zillow features are built on unlicensed IBM patents, including tech that sounds an awful lot like what Zestimates would need.<\/p>\n

IBM says that they\u2019ve been trying to reach a patent licensing deal with Zillow for three years, which means that when Zillow filed suit<\/a> against Compass for stealing Zillow\u2019s intellectual property in April, they in turn were driving IBM to the end of its patience for not licensing theirs. (Does that mean that IBM should be suing Compass, too? Who knows!)<\/p>\n

At any rate, it\u2019s no surprise that Zillow\u2019s considering a move deeper into the rental market. That kind of expansion has been a key part of their business plan for a long time now. While they\u2019re certainly a leader in the \u201cdaydreaming about buying a house\u201d space, they\u2019re aiming to be involved with the entire home-purchasing process, from start to finish. From websites for Realtors, to instant homebuying and mortgage lending<\/a>, Zillow\u2019s dreaming of being the ultimate real estate service provider (even if they swore all along they never would practice real estate).<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not new to the rental space, either. Their current rental management system includes applications and tenant screening<\/a>, as well as online rent payment<\/a>. It\u2019ll be interesting to see which of these expansions pay off for them in the long run. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(CORPORATE NEWS) Zillow continues to expand their offering, but can they succeed with all the patent lawsuits they’re in?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":337717,"featured_media":14603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[1234,102],"class_list":["post-14602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-corporate","tag-real-estate-news","tag-zillow"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2019\/11\/a-drones-overhead-view-of-an-urban-sprawl-in-florida-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/337717"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14602"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14611,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14602\/revisions\/14611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}