And Now For The Hockey Sticks

So I am assuming that most of you have, at this stage, heard of Zillow.com, the next-generation real estate platform that was started by Rich Barton, founder of Expedia (while at MSFT) and venture partner at Benchmark. Bill Gurley, who is also on the boards of Linden (Second Life), NanoSolar (lots of press) and Red5 (who are so gonna beat up WoW) sits on the board and watches over the $87M invested in the company so far.

What’s so special? Zillow.com lets you get free home value estimates - determined by an algorithm that uses past transaction values, neighbourhood price indices, features of the house, and a slew of other variables. You can get dollar values on all homes, not just those for sale at the moment. So why is this cool? Since property represents most people’s largest single asset, knowing how much your house is worth is half the rent in determing net worth. Because you don’t sell your house that often, sometimes it’s nice knowing that there could be a couple extra thousand in the bank (millions if you live in central London, really). And, of course, you can see how much your neighbours’ houses are worth. And your bosses’. And Mel Gibson’s. Welcome to what I refer to as “property porn” (according to the BBC it’s a real word now!) Oggling property prices is hugely fun and it gave Zillow.com a whooping 2M uniques in its first month of operations. On the back of that, you can build a fine advertising business or a lead generation business for real estate agents or an agent listings site (or things more sinister).

So here is my thinking of a pretty cool NewCo based on Zillow.com, adapted for continental Europe. In many European countries - the UK is a huge exception here - the homeowner quotient is low compared to the US. People aren’t as obsessed with buying houses, valuing properties, shopping the market. Instead, in Germany at least, the one big asset almost everyone owns and truly cares about is their car. We’re the cradle of the automobile and despite years of lacklustre economic performance, people are still driving big, shiny German cars and caring very, very much about getting access to one on the cheap. Indeed, Schwacke, Germany’s largest car valuation service, is big, big business. Such big business in fact that it’s owned by someone called EurotaxGlass, which in turn was picked up for $600M+ by Candover in 06. C’mon, lol @ “EurotaxGlass” - sounds like such an SPV. Every time you query Schwacke, that’s a sweet €7.90 (who sets their pricing policy?! wtf).

So, long story short and most of you have guessed it by now: build Zillow.com for cars for continental Europe. Reduce information asymmetry by giving away car valuations for free. You can base valuations on car retailers contributing to the site, on insurance company figures, on published transactions. Many participants in the car retail markets will happily contribute to pay less to those blood sucking car valuation experts (or at least to fact-check their bums). In summary: If you put free car prices on the internet, traffic will come. Highly qualified traffic, at that. On top of those uniques, build a sweet advertising + lead gen + marketplace for cars business. And watch autotrader/mobile.de and others’ market shares crumble.

Information wants to be free. You want to be rich. Go build it (and talk to Atlas about investment).

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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 License. Please attribute. And do contact me if you are looking for financing at max DOT niederhofer AT gmail DOT com.