House-valuation site may have Realtors tossing and turning

The Chicago Tribune reports:

The man who helped shoot the travel-agency business between the eyes now has the real estate industry in his sights.

Richard Barton, 38, co-founder of the Expedia.com self-serve travel Web site, set off a year of speculation, occasionally bordering on hysteria, when he announced that he had secured $32 million for a real estate Web site called Zillow.

The news media, industry Web sites and bloggers spent months postulating that Zillow would be everything from a national multiple-listing service to an online transaction manager. Real estate agents fretted that he was about to put them out of a job, as Expedia had done to many travel agents.

At midnight Tuesday, Barton unleashed a test version of Zillow, and the response was so intense--300,000 page views between midnight and 7 a.m. Wednesday, Pacific time--that its servers crashed. Zillow spent most of Wednesday promising to be back later.

As we've said before we've added Zillow.com to the links on the right hand side.