Looking to buy (or sell)?

If you're looking to buy or sell a house, townhouse, condo, whatever...then you need to know what it's worth. I mean, do you have any idea how annoying it is to check the relative cost of the housing in an area? How do you know, quickly, what is a good price to list your unit at?

Interestingly enough, there is now a quick and non-intrusive (they don't ask for any personal information - unlike some other sites) way to check the price of a location within a certain range. I checked out our townhouse and it matched pretty much exactly what I expected and offered me some interesting graphs to look at too. Check it out.

Goto Zillow.com and enter an address, or a street name, or a neighborhood and the city or state or zip code. Once the map shows up with prices on it you can zoom in to select a specific home. Or, if you already have a home specified, you can click the "See more home details" link in the pop-up window. You'll get a value range based on certain criteria and you'll see a graph. Click on the graph to check out several different comparisons, including value of the home in the last 1, 5, or 10 years or even the value increase/decrease from the last purchase (sale) date.

Very cool if you want to check out your house or parents house or whatever. It doesn't have the entire US yet (it's still in beta), but it looks like it has all the major metro areas plus some.

Further evidence

The following comic is from Ok/Cancel, a comic strip about HCI and usability. The fact that I find it fairly amusing is just further evidence of my geekdom...or professional humor. Either one. Maybe you'll find it funny too.

Interfacing...

I have seen an interface that is awesome. In fact, it is probably one of the coolest new-tech interfaces I've seen that has potential practical value. This is my job, people...to get geeked out about interesting new interaction technologies. And then figure out how to use them in practical and efficient ways.

Go to the following site and watch the video on the righthand side. Tell me it's not intriguing...especially after the tech/fun demos at the beginning. This is not your typical touch-screen technology. This is much faster and can handle multiple touch points at a time. In fact, multiple people can use the same interface at once, like with the game being played at the end of the video.

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/

Enjoy.

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