Zillow.com has been around for a while now and is a great website filled with useful information. But, the iPhone app leaves much to be desired. You can either put in a specific address or use the GPS to find your location. The app will find your location and display the surrounding home values with a light blue diamond icon. Homes currently for sale are in red and the recently sold are yellow. Without touching the icons, you can see each home's “Zestimate”. This is an estimate of the home's current market value. Tapping once on the icon will bring up the exact address, the Zestimate, and general information about the house, if any is available. Several times, no information was even available to view. If you tap on the general information, a new window will appear that displays more specific details about the house. It shows you square feet, a range of estimated value, property tax information from the last sale, recent comparable sales, and a link to visit the full home information on Zillow.com. This screen also includes a nice little graph displaying the value of the home over a one, five, or ten year period. Something missing from this screen that I wish was included is a “favorites” button. I would have liked to tap on a button that would remember the houses I want to make an appointment to see, or even going a step further, email a list of favorites to myself.

Heading back to the main screen gives you three options to find houses around your current location. Street view is a simple map view of street names only. Hybrid view displays street names and satellite images of the area. List view displays the houses in a scrollable list with a picture, if it's available, and general information.

I say, “if it's available” a few times in this review because many times, information about a home is missing. You are more likely to find the information you want if a house is actually for sale. Sometimes you will see pictures of the house, other times you won't. Maybe it's just me, but if you were looking for a house, wouldn't you want to see pictures? Photos should be a requirement to be listed on any site. But, many photos are just not there.

My biggest problem with this app is its accuracy. I drove around and saw houses that were clearly for sale, but not listed on Zillow. This didn't just happen once, but many times throughout my drive. The whole purpose of the app is to see a house and look up the information on the go, but was unable to do this with the ones we saw with for sale signs on the lawn. They just weren't listed on Zillow as actually being for sale. Also, the app is incredibly slow over 3G. I was only driving about 20 miles per hour down the side streets, but still had to actually stop and wait for the app to refresh and start showing the data. This was probably the most frustrating part of the whole experience. I saw more of the grey grid screen than actual maps. No one is going to walk around looking for homes. The app should be able to keep up with users traveling around faster than one mile per hour.

Zillow has tons of potential. It just needs to be seriously refined. The map is ugly. The refresh rate is terribly slow. The information is not accurate. There is no favorites option. There are just too many things this app lacks. Even though it's free, I would not even recommend wasting your time trying it right now. I'm hoping the developer puts out an update to make the app what it should be. I would be willing to give it another shot when anything after 1.0 comes out. For now, there are other apps out there that do the whole real estate thing on the iPhone better.