CHICAGO - 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 Feb. 7, Barton unleashed a test version of Zillow, and the response was so intense - 300,000 page views between midnight and 7 a.m. Feb. 8, Pacific time - that its servers crashed. Zillow spent most of Feb. 8 promising to be back later.

Zillow is a home-valuation tool that spits out "comps," or comparable market analyses, for buyers and sellers who want to know the worth of their homes - or their neighbors' homes.

It's hardly the first such online tool, but it may be the most elaborate. It claims a database of 60 million homes. That's 2 terabytes - 2 trillion bytes - of information, and Zillow aims to nearly double that database to 110 million homes.

The site combines satellite and traditional mapping with transaction data from county governments to create a "Zestimate" - a home's purported value, mapped side-by-side with neighbors' homes. Users can enter data about their homes' improvements - remodeled kitchen, finished basement, etc. - to get a more refined guess.

While Zillow's 75-person staff in Seattle labored to keep the sluggish Zillow site running Feb. 9, Barton discussed how he sees the industry evolving.

Question: Why have you gone into the real estate business?

Answer: I started up Expedia at Microsoft in 1994, and at that time I was also waving my arms and jumping up and down about real estate, telling them it's another business where there's tons of information and people want to be empowered, it's not just travel. I was evangelical then.

I sold [Microsoft on] the idea of Expedia, and I was also on the team that developed Microsoft Home Advisor (an early online listings site).

Q: Home Advisor was a very expensive flop for Microsoft. Why didn't it work?

A: It was early. The industry and consumers weren't ready for it. The industry wasn't even ready to put listings on the Internet in 1995. The Realtors and travel agents and stockbrokers weren't ready for their information to be cracked open and made available to the world. It took a while for the industry to understand that the Internet is an incredible marketing opportunity.

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