ZILLOW TALK

How-to advice on the new paradigms of real estate.

When the 2008 housing bubble popped, the dynamics of buying, selling and renting shifted significantly. Rascoff, CEO of Zillow, the “largest real estate site on the Web,” with 90 million visitors a month, and its chief economist, Humphries, pull together exhaustive data obtained from constantly updated algorithms and crunch these figures to give readers a definitive guide to real estate in the 21st century. They discuss the pros and cons of buying versus renting, having a fixed-rate mortgage over an adjustable-rate mortgage, and whether that kitchen remodel or man cave are really the best investments of your time and money. Want to know the best time of year to list a home, what a street name means in terms of housing prices, and how to spot the next neighborhood where houses will appreciate in value? These are just some of the numerous questions the authors address using the information they’ve compiled from their database of more than 100 million listings on Zillow. They analyze the superstitions surrounding numbers in a home’s price, “decode” the words used in a listing to describe a house, debunk long-held real estate myths (e.g., always buy the worst home in the best neighborhood), consider the advantages and disadvantages of buying a foreclosure, and even look at the effect a nearby Starbucks has on housing prices. Informative and entertaining, their advice is filled with concrete figures enhanced by graphs and charts that help readers absorb their counsel in small, easy-to-manage bites.

A collection of straightforward, easily assimilated facts and figures on the real estate business—a must-read for readers interested in buying, selling or renting a home.