What’s in a Portmanteau?

It has been 90 days or so since Spencer Rascoff and Stan Humphries of the Zillow Group released their book, Zillow Talk. Published by Grand Central Publishing, the volume carries the subtitle The New Rules of Real Estate. One cannot help but observe that there has been a lack of buzz and discussion across the industry regarding the book's unique and highly relevant content. This compelling collection of knowledge, discovery and insight should have the potential to change how the industry thinks about the new realities of its various markets and how it judges properties as being appropriate for consideration for purchases or rental. Moreover, it might also drive industry reconsideration relative to the role of respect in its interactions with the consumer.

As a starting point, the book offers the proverbial 100,000-foot view of the changed (and changing) role of research, statistics and information across the entirety of our culture, including the real estate sector. The authors talk in reasonably humble terms about having created a collection of technologies that use a million valuation models to process 3.2 terabytes of data each day. They don't suggest that this is the ultimate technology. For Zillow Talk, technology is a mere supporting actor. This is not a book about technology or mining gold. This is a book about what one, anyone, can do with the crown jewels of an expanded, innovative and creative real estate related information system. That's all.

While it is difficult to nail down which of book's many salient points are the most compelling, a particularly strong argument can be made for the concept of replacing myths with facts. The authors gently point out that for much of the past fifty years real estate related decisions by consumers, and even institutions and investors, have been made on the basis of cultural myths, many of which were created and propagated by real estate service providers.