Is zillow a good tool to find investment properties?

[Maciej Michalak]

As the title states my question I'm curious to hear people's opinions on this. Do successful investors use zillow as a resource. I'm a newbie looking at properties and would like your input.

[Mike H.]

Here's what I like about zillow. I can plug in the address of a home I'm interested in and can see everything I want to see. 
1) Listing price history. How long has been sitting on the market. How many price drops? Any deals fallen through.
2) Sales history.
3) Assessment history.
4) A map where I can filter out sold only comps and/or rental comps very easily so I can get a better sense of the comps in that home's subdivision. Every town has different pricing pockets. And I can only imagine how important that is when figuring out comps to larger cities or even large towns (i.e. over 50k people).

I was somewhat aware that zillow didn't have all the comps. But it has enough for what I need. And when I go back to my appraisal estimates that I've given to my lenders before purchase, I think I've been within my typical 5k range on about 80 to 90% of guesstimates. So I would say that zillow is useful enough at least to someone like me.

I've tried redfin but find the interface less than intuitive and don't really believe it gives me the information I like to see when evaluating deals.

btw: I use realtor.com, hudhomestore, hubzu and homesearch for finding the homes. I only use zillow for evaluating whether the homes are deals or not....