Jon Barclay

I ran across a great Real Estate site recently. Up until recently Zillow.com was my favorite site for watching what was happening in our local market. Zillow is a great website that allows you to look through an area and see estimates of home values in an area based on past sales data. However, Zillow has some problems locally because Utah does not disclose as much information on real estate transactions as other states. Additionally Zillow does not show all the homes listed on the MLS, They have to be added individually in order to show up.

BlueRoof.com is a different take on a real estate web site. Focused on the local market, it graphically displays all the homes on the MLS using Google maps. This makes it extraordinarily easy to brows around the map and see what homes are for sales in any given area and what people are asking. BlueRoof also has a blog about the local real estate market. It is interesting to read the insights of a savvy agent with his eye on the local market.

BlueRoof is the perfect compliment to what Zillow lacks, and gives individuals a powerful way of viewing the MLS. While these two websites are no substitute for an excellent agent, they do empower the consumer which is always a good thing!