Zillow is an online real estate database company which provided online tools for home buying and is directly correlated wiht MLS which is the centralize database for all real estate listings in the USA.
Zillow targets different groups of audience where majority of the audience is the home buyers looking for new home to purchase. It also serves homeowners for different assesments about their current property as well as the realtors who can use the website to target specific listing for thier clients.
The key object is to provide the most effecient and more reliable set of information to the target audience regarding the home listings with full on privacy and personal perferences.
As a recent homebuyer I have spend substantial time on zillow. As I have mentioned earlier that the data for most of these listing come from MLS. I did find that there were some discrepancies in the data which was shown. It is sometime discomforting for endusers as they tend to move away from a listing where there is not enough data or the might be incorrect. I wanted to design a module where endusers can submit complaints or more accurate data in order to for zillow to review and take actions accordingly. Either approve the requested changes or respond with a different solution to the problem. Another solution which I would like to incorporate is to utilize town or county office records to see if the property has any previous issues. Many of the users are unsure or unaware of the previous history of the property and by the time they came to know about it. They are simply too much into the process to backdown. The new proposed solution can have the same bussiness logic as employed by carfax where you can see the history of any outstanding issues know for a car you are buying.
I think it would make sense, since the end users solely rely on the information provided on the website in most cases our goal should be to provide the most current and most accurate data possible to the endusers. Since it’s a public sight and we are not obligated to hide any information.