zillow — 'A web site for real–estate voyeurs'

Finally, a real–estate voyeur website that doesn't require you to deal with a realtor to find stuff out.

Walt Mossberg brought it to my attention in his "Personal Technology" column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

It's called zillow.

Long story short:

1) You put in the property's street address and Zip Code

2) In a few seconds up pops an aerial photograph overlaid with street names, house prices for the property in question as well as those in the neighborhood, and details about the home you're interested in

That's it: no need to identify yourself so a pain–in–the–butt local realtor can contact you as the price for obtaining this information.

Little by little the great real–estate information MLS firewall is crumbling.

What a wonderful thing — for everyone but realtors.

The new site, still in beta and created by the principals behind Expedia, works with any property — not just those for sale.

Zillow doesn't work with Safari, alas, but I've come up against that often enough in recent months that I've got Firefox 1.5 for Mac armed and ready in my applications folder and instantly rolled it out, with great success, for zillow.

Alas, zillow hasn't yet gotten to Podunk towns like Charlottesville so I had to make do with looking up all my friends' houses in other cities — good fun, that.

You could easily fritter away hours or even the rest of the day on zillow — be careful.

You know how easily you're distracted.