Zip Realty Reviews

Editor's Star Ratings:

Foreclosure Listings:
Searching Tools:
Features:
Ease of Use / Navigation:
Ease of Joining / Registration:
Customer Support:
Value for Money:
Overall Star Rating:

Membership Costs:

• Registration is Free (Zip Realty make its money via commission on sales)

Features:

• Access to approximately 1.5 million US properties listed at any one time
• Includes foreclosures, pre-foreclosures, new constructions etc
• Over 10,000 photographs
• Flexible choice of search criteria, including:
  • city
  • state
  • zip
  • price range
  • number of bedrooms
  • number of bathrooms
  • square footage

• Uses the power of the internet to streamline the realty process
• Zip Realty put you in touch with a licensed local agent
• Change your agent online if you don't like them
• Sell your home with Zip Realty and save up to 25% on traditional realting
• Advertise your home with a 360 degree virtual tour on Zip's listings
• Buy a home, save up to 25% on traditional realting and receive 20% of Zip's commission
• Keep track of buying or selling your home in real time
• "Price Track" features allows you to find homes with reduced prices
• You can receive email alerts of new listings
• Customer service by phone or email
• Website available in English, Spanish, French etc
• It's easy to cancel your subscription online with no fuss
• $250-back satisfaction guarantee

Editor's Verdict:

Zip Realty is a fully-fledged realty service that believes it can use the unique strengths of the internet medium to bring customers faster, more efficient and significantly cheaper real estate services compared to the traditional approach, including foreclosure trading.

ZipRealty.com is a slick, professional website that nevertheless has a friendly and accessible feel to it. The searching interface is nicely designed and easy to use, even for beginners. The site as a whole feels light and airy with just the right amount of color and not too much clutter. Everything you'll need to use is easy to find and clearly explained.

You can of course use this website to invest in the foreclosures market but it also deals in conventional buying and selling of all sorts of houses, condos, land plots and pretty much all other kinds of homes, but not commercial properties or rentals. Because every aspect of these properties is logged online and fully searchable you can look specifically for new constructions, fixer-uppers or first homes much more efficiently than by gazing into the local Realtor's window. In these respects, the internet is indeed an ideal medium for making buying or selling a home a much less haphazard and traumatic process.

Another such advantage is the ability to access literally hundreds of thousands of property listings more or less instantaneously. These are updated seemingly every other minute and you can even set up your ZipRealty.com membership so the website will automatically email you the instant one appears that fits your selected criteria. The search tools themselves are every bit as flexible as you'll find on the very best dedicated foreclosure websites and are backed up by a huge range of extras, on top of which Zip Realty are clearly always looking to add new and innovative tools to improve their service, which is a good sign. There is a decent, succinct FAQ that explains how the various services work very clearly, though there seems to be less actual background information about how realty trading and foreclosures work in general than you will find on our number one site. This is not a major problem, though, as this sort of information is widely available on the internet anyway.

The process of searching for properties is straightforward, if rather linear, and is structured around registering by each area you want to search in. This allows Zip to search through many databases of for-sale, foreclosed and pre-foreclosed properties, giving preference to your city or state. You can search in up to 3 metropolitan areas at any one time. This is a limit set by MLS regulations rather than Zip Realty itself so there's no getting around it, but it is possible to take one away and add another in its place if you so wish.

Registering is legally mandatory for any service that allows you access to MLS information, but fortunately it's free, so no big deal. Not charging for registration is possible because, unlike a lot of websites in this category who operate on a subscription basis, Zip make their money largely by commissions on sales, much like a regular realtor. Except Zip give 20% of their commissions to their buyers as a way of passing on the savings they make by operating online. In addition, they estimate that they save you up to 25% of the cost of buying a house against traditional realty trading. This is not something that's within the scope of this review to verify as we're more concerned with its listing functions, but it's certainly worth investigating.

They estimate that selling your home is similarly up to 25% cheaper online. This is another area where the internet can really help revolutionize what is traditionally a slow, cumbersome and expensive process. For example, this allows them to advertise your home much more widely than would normally be possible, gives you access to Comparative Market Analysis information and lets interested parties view a 360 degree virtual tour of your home online. This also makes it much easier to stay informed and up to date with the progress of the sale by allowing you to monitor in real-time how many potential buyers have viewed your property listing, expressed an interest or scheduled a visit, as well as providing popularity stats of your home relative to similar properties on the market.

Not every part of this process can take place online of course; Zip Realty will also put you in touch with one of their local agents who will administer the parts of the realty experience that work best the old fashioned way. In this respect, the internet angle merely serves to streamline and facilitate the other aspects of the process. Fortunately, it's also fairly easy to change agents online in case you encounter the sort of fundamental incompatibility that cannot be resolved (eg. Mets or Yankees). Similarly it's possible to unsubscribe from their service online, instantly and without any hassle at all, by selecting the "Inactivate my account" option on your account status.

If, upon closing, you find you are not satisfied with Zip Realty's service, they guarantee to pay you $250 upon receipt of a detailed letter of your reservations. With some companies such guarantees turn out to involve a lengthy and cumbersome process of form-filling and telephone conversations designed to deter customers from pursuing their claim, but Zip Realty's guarantee appears to be a genuine attempt to promote good word of mouth and improve their service in the future. Buying and selling homes online is still a fairly new idea, of course, so with the best will in the world there are still bound to be areas that need improvement. Zip Realty also invite customers to help determine the level of their agent's client satisfaction bonus, which is reassuring (though less so for the agent).

Obviously there are aspects of buying and selling homes online, foreclosures or otherwise, that will be different from the experience you might be used to. For one thing, you should expect to do more of the homework yourself rather than have a realtor do it all for you, for another there will probably be less hand-holding involved. Fortunately everything you need for the former is easily accessible online and the latter is only a problem if you enjoy the company of realtors anyway. If you go into the process with your eyes open and have a good idea of what you're looking for, chances are you'll find buying or selling a home with Zip Realty a much less traumatic and time-consuming experience than is the norm.

Click the button below to check out ZipRealty.com for yourself...