Zillow is one our sister companies in the Ignition and has just released their public beta.

It’s a cool application to play with even if you aren’t buying a house.

You can see house values and property lines overlaid on the scrollable satellite images, get graphs of your house estimated and sales values over time, find comparable houses, and more. All free, of course.

All of this makes my wonder whether anyone has attempted large scale data mining an analysis in support of real estate investment, similar to what is done on the stock market.

Probably not a good idea for Zillow of course– sounds like a good way to blow through a lot of VC funding!

But for a player with deep pockets and lots of data about the expected and actual selling prices of houses, it seems like it should be possible to beat the rest of the market, which is operating with much less data.