Late yesterday, Zillow and 11 newspaper companies announced they were partnering on online real estate advertising. The announcement came during NAA’s Real Estate Forum and is billed as a “significant step in the national aggregation of real estate listings online.”

Mort Goldstrom, VP of Advertising for NAA, wrote in an e-mail this morning that if the points of the partnership are to 1.) maintain the industry’s position as the premier marketplace for real estate, 2.) to aggregate a database that helps consumers in the participating markets, and 3.) to make doing business with newspapers easier for those in the real estate business, then those are all good things. However, he wrote, “All of that remains to be seen.”

For Zillow, this is a good thing. The real estate listings from newspaper companies will bolster Zillow’s prominence and usefulness – and accuracy. When I looked up my home, Zillow’s listing stated it had four bedrooms. I registered as the homeowner on the site -- a very easy process -- and fixed (um... lowered) that.

Zillow.com launched in early 2006 with “Zestimates” of home valuations plus data on recent sale prices. In this volatile real estate market, some people believe this information – if it’s accurate – can be useful. Later that year, Zillow.com opened to community input (i.e. you can update information about your own home like I did), added question and answer forums and more.

In August, The New York Times’ Michelle Slatalla wrote, “With a growing number of Internet sites trolling public databases for financial facts, it has become increasingly easy in the last two years for information addicts like me to perform party tricks by announcing to our friends all kinds of delicious snippets that once were considered intimate, known mainly to brokers or people with enough time to drive to the courthouse to flip through musty files. But it’s no longer just cocktail chatter. With a nationwide real estate crisis in full bloom thanks to subprime mortgage woes, falling prices and rising loan rates, homeowners are increasingly turning to Internet sites to try to glean bits of information that may shed light on when to refinance, or whether to sell.”

The press release with more information about the Zillow-newspapers partnership is on Zillow.com. All the newspapers involved in the Zillow deal are part of the Yahoo newspaper consortium, but not all Yahoo consortium newspapers have aligned with Zillow.