Photography

The San Diego skyline at night with a plane coming in for landing from the east.

© Travis Houston 2006

Downtown By Design Home Tour 2006

The Downtown Residential Marketing Alliance is proud to announce the fifth annual Downtown by Design Home Tour on Saturday, November 4, and Sunday, November 5, 2006 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Tour highlights eight downtown condominiums for those who are interested in the downtown lifestyle. Several spectacular homes will be open to self-guided walking tours, offering participants a glimpse into some of the most remarkable homes in town! Noted below are some highlights of the event.

• Opportunities to tour of eight downtown condominiums
• A festival with food tastings, entertainment, give-aways and more
• Buses available for pick up and drop off at the main tour locations

Tickets are $30 per person, or $55 per couple. Please call (619) 233-5008 to reserve your tickets today!

Zillow Founder Adds Adjustments To His Web Site

Zillow.com, the Internet-based service that has posted the estimated values of 68 million homes, flunked the price test with its own co-founder and CEO, Rich Barton. So he has inaugurated a feature to solve his problem and that of many other skeptics.

Barton, who also founded and previously ran the Expedia travel Web site, announced that visitors to the Zillow.com site can now adjust the details on their property listings and produce a second value that will sit alongside Zillow’s “zestimate.”

In Barton’s case the automated Zillow valuation program overlooked improvements made to his 3,740-square-foot Seattle home, built in 1904. The value listed on Zillow.com is $2.8 million, $400,000 less than the number generated by the program after Barton upped the number of bathrooms from 2.25 to 3.5, listed the number of rooms (14) and filled in other details.

On the Zillow site, Barton spelled out the details and shared the reason for his openness: his home is for sale at $2,995,000, which is higher than the “zestimate” but lower than his adjusted value.

Barton also provided a link to his real estate agent’s listing page, in case anyone is interested in buying the four-bedroom “Classic Seattle Box” in “Denny Blaine, one of Seattle’s best neighborhoods.”

Many real estate agents have complained that Zillow figures are faulty, often because they reflect old sales prices, county assessments not in line with the real estate market and other incomplete or outdated data.

from signonsandiego.com