Looking for a place to rent, but don’t want to overpay? Zillow.com today is unveiling a new service which assigns estimated rental prices for 90 million homes across the U.S. You may recall that Zillow took some heat more than five years ago when it launched its Zestimates for homes.
Many people thought the company’s algorithm — which draws on factors such as location, bedrooms and sales of nearby homes– undervalued or overvalued properties.
“Computed using a proprietary algorithm that takes public record information, as well as information from hundreds of thousands of rental listings on Zillow, they are starting points in determining a home or apartment’s fair rent price,” said Zillow.com CEo Spencer Rascoff in blog post. “Combine this with information on comparable homes and apartments for rent on Zillow, and a prospective renter will have many more data points to figure out how much they should pay for a rental.”
The company also says that the new service will also be beneficial to landlords, helping them to determine how to price their units.
Zillow started listing rental properties in 2009. The Seattle company — which attracted 16.8 million visitors last month — is backed by Benchmark Capital, Par Capital and others.
Here’s a screen grab of the new service:
