Zillow expands into hyperlocal news

courtesy Lost Remote TV Blog
by Cory Bergman
July 11

A big announcement from the Seattle-based real estate site Zillow: it’s creating community web pages for 6,500 neighborhoods in 130 U.S. cities. Users will be able to upload events, news and photos. Writes John Cook in the Seattle PI’s Venture Blog:

The idea is that people will not only visit Zillow to learn about homes, but — one could imagine — local restaurants, recent crimes or the history of the neighborhood. With this feature, you could also see Zillow moving down the path of trying to link people together in certain neighborhoods to share a lawnmower, sell a grill, host a fundraiser or, perhaps, find a date. And if that occurs, the real estate information and Zestimates offered by Zillow today might just be a Trojan horse into other lucrative advertising markets.