Relying in part on homeowner pride and desire to set the record straight about their properties, real estate site Zillow.com has found a way to benefit from the inevitable inaccuracies in its reports.

The initiative, officially launched today, will enable homeowners to "claim" their homes and correct errors or eliminate omissions displayed on a Zillow profile regarding their properties.

When that happens, Zillow takes note and those changes help the company create internal portraits of homeowners, profiles leveraged in Zillow's new Home Direct Ads program.

"We opened up the database for owners to say, 'You know what? You got my square feet wrong,' or 'I just did an addition,'" said Greg Schwartz, Zillow's VP of sale. "It also allows owners to prepare an estimate of what the home's real value is."

The information is a potential gold mine for advertisers once it's crunched by Zillow's algorithms and combined with other revealing data gathered to drive the patent-pending Home Direct Ads program, he said.

Home Direct Ads is billed as a tool designed to help advertisers push their ads where they're likely to be most successful. It offers targeting of ads by street address, house value, and "psychographic cluster," Schwartz said of the new initiative.

Zillow, which has more than 70 million U.S. homes in its database, allows Web site visitors to see the estimated value of a home and nearby properties. The values are based property tax assessments, previous sales and other information obtained by Zillow.

When a homeowner types in an address on Zillow's Web site, Zillow presents an aerial view of the home. A person can drill down to get more information about the house and others in the neighborhood. If somebody "claims" the house, the information will be more detailed and potentially more accurate. To date, one million people have claimed a home, Schwartz said.

Zillow has also follows indicators to predict when people are planning to put their homes up for sale or begin fix-up projects, according to Schwartz.

"It's a pretty cool model," Schwartz said. And one of particular interest to marketers of home improvement, appliance, furniture, and other related products.

How does Zillow figure that out, short of hiring a fortune teller? When people plan to sell their home, they often post photos of their homes online. They also undertake major renovations or purchase big-ticket items such as refrigerators or replace carpeting.

With its home and geographic targeting tool, Zillow gives advertisers a chance to direct ads to people visiting a specific home’s Zillow page. Schwartz said this type of advertising is similar to direct mail in many ways and insists its unique online. "All this targeting is in the context of selling, buying, or renovating a home. I don’t think anybody in the traditional real estate industry is doing this," he said.

He stressed that, despite the depth of Zillow's new targeting capability, user privacy is maintained. "We don't have names," he said. "We don't want names. We are not mixing online with offline data."

Schwartz, previously VP of advertising sales at CNNMoney.com, said Zillow's 20-person in-house sales team is selling the Home Direct Ads to large advertisers. For local and individual advertisers, the company, in April, introduced Zillow EZ Ads, a self-serve system that allows companies to create and buy ads to be shown in specific ZIP codes.

Source: clickz.com