Have been trying to learn more about Zilpy and am very curious about what the relationship with Zillow actually is. The WhoIs Lookup info is very vague, everything is listed as a Private Registration. Nothing like the registration info for Zillow which clearly identifies the company headquarters. According to WhoIs, Zilpy is connected to the domain server for FindPetCare.com which seems very odd to me. And then, I found this posting to find sub-contractors to help build Zilpy. Below is a screenshot of the sub-contractor posting from GetAFreelancer.com. Maybe my curiosity is just getting the better of me. I doubt Zillow would be very happy about their logo being on the homepage of Zilpy if there wasn’t a relationship. But I would have thought that if Zillow was partnered with a rental version of their site that there would be a ton of in-house engineers to help build it.
UPDATE…thanks to the quick response from Drew at Zillow…please see the comments section for his explanation.
January 31, 2008 at 10:57 am
Bill-
Hey, it’s Drew from Zillow. I just wanted to clarify the relationship between Zilpy & Zillow. There is no formal strategic partnership between our companies. Zilpy is, however, planning to use quite a bit of data from the Zillow API (I talked to their founder yesterday) as they continue to build out their website. Hope this helps clear things up.
January 31, 2008 at 10:58 am
Thanks for the clarification Drew! And thanks for visiting my blog!
January 31, 2008 at 11:39 am
Thanks Drew for letting us know.
January 31, 2008 at 11:45 am
Hi Bill, this is Bogdan from Zilpy. As Drew said, there is no formal strategic partnership, however we do use Zillow data and plan to expand on it shortly. More partner logos will appear in our site very shortly. Zilpy is built with in-house engineers, and yes I did co-found FindPetCare.com that’s why the nameservers point there (for few more days though). Since zilpy launched and out of the “garage”, we are now in process of giving it its own “home”.
January 31, 2008 at 11:54 am
Hi Bogdan….thanks for the additional clarification! Am sure you’re juggling a lot of things now that Zilpy is launched, but you and the engineers have built a really impressive site. Every time I visit it I say Wow! And I’ve actually used FindPetCare.com myself in the past and thought it was really useful. Do you plan to add currently available rental listings to Zilpy at some point?
January 31, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Bill, we do show rentals as part of estimating rent for a specific property. If you enter in search a property address or cross streets you will get a “spot rental CMA”. Put your mouse over the map, I think you will love seeing dates, amenities and more. Here’s an example in San Francisco:
http://www.zilpy.com/US/California/San_Francisco_County/San_Francisco/Zipcode_94123/Van_Ness_Ave_At_Lombard_St/0,0,3,2,0,0,37.80128,-122.4246,1,0
Feel free to play with your ideal property, real or not, we give you a CMA as if it was a real property there: change the type, bedrooms, baths and nevertheless sqft. We DO make SQFT based CMAs as well IF the comparables have that info. In my example above, there is data, just specify the sqft and you will see a change in the CMA which, is done w/o sqft previously.
Let me know if you’d like to chat more. Feel free to email me directly. We’d love to hear your feedback. After all, we built Zilpy to help the rental community and we trully want you and your readers to tell us what they think, want and so on. We have a feedback forum (every page, top link), please be as critique as you can, at the end of the day, we need to make sure Zilpy fulfills its mission to be The Reference in Rental market facts and we need your help.
January 31, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Thanks Bogdan….what I was really curious about was if you had plans to add rental listings that showed who to contact if you were interested in renting that specific home? On Zillow, they show For Sale listings with contact information for the real estate agent, so I was curious if you planned to do that with rentals?
June 11, 2008 at 4:07 pm
[...] this site was created by the people behind Zillow, but after a bit of digging, it seems that they aren’t officially connected. If you want to check out the site for yourself, visit zilpy.com or go directly to their St. Louis [...]
July 22, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Bogdan, I’m a apt. real estate broker and have been using your site since inception to track rental values throughout CA. Your guys have come a long way and it just keeps getting better. Do you have plans to allow advertisers place geographical specific ads?