A real estate profile on Zillow

Richard Barton, the founder of Expedia, wants to succeed in the fast-growing market for U.S. property websites, too, by opening up his Zillow.com to user-generated content similar to popular networking sites such as MySpace.

The move will allow homeowners and real estate agents to add properties’ photos, descriptions, improvements and selling price to Zillow, reports the Financial Times. Zillow.com, founded by Barton and Lloyd Frink, another former Expedia executive, has created a compendium of individual home pages, with price estimates and aerial photos, for 67 million homes in the U.S. Ultimately, Zillow would combine elements of free listings site Craigslist, social-networking site MySpace and online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The site has 3.5 million unique users, and 252,000 have signed in and amended their home records. Zillow faces competition from a number of real estate sites, such as Move.com and Realestate.com, although the company says it is the only major user-generated property website, other than some property blogs.