VentureBeat: Zillow opens up Q&A on every home
Gal Josefsberg
· 2 years ago
Maybe they could work on their price engine first. I'm in the market for a house in the Bay Area and tried to use Zillow but their pricing is all over the map. When the Zillow estimate is 1,000,000 but the sold for price is 100,000, you've either got a bug, bad UI or a bad pricing engine.
Frank Joseph
· 2 years ago
Gale - First off you like Zillow. I get to ask some very important questions. When I look up a home and find it sold for 189K in 1997 and now its on the market for 660K... I ask is this price justified. The sales history is very justified. I ignore its estimates which are meaningless.
The $100K may be forclosure property.
Back to my orginal problem with Zestimates... lets face some facts... Zillow needs to add a second price line which is the properties longterm value... base 1997 plus inflation. Over the long run RE only keeps up with inflation. Else its a bubble as we see today in SV RE. If anything, Zillow provides a great website where buyers can clearly see how bubbely our RE market is and how much it will correct. FYI im shooting for 50%...
Michel
· 2 years ago
I don't think Zillow is trying to fool anyone with the accuracy of their pricing engine. If you read the information about it on their site (here - http://www.zillow.com/howto/DataCoverageZestima...) you'll see that in the markets where they are performing the best, their Zestimates are still only ~75% of the times within 10% of the selling price on properties. On a half-a-million dollar house, that's a 100,000$ range. It bears to ask, do you have to be a real estate genius to guess the value of a house +/- 50,000$ if the house sale price turns out to be 500,000$?
Having said this, I think their RE tools are fantastic and if you claim your house, update your house facts, hand pick the comps and basically feed more & better data to Zillow, then it definitely lets you do something that there was no way for normal people (like me!) to do easily before they came around.
50% RE correction... You'd have to be in a very, very unlucky market where most people were sub-prime borrowers and they all happened to foreclose around the same time! Won't happen in my market but maybe in yours?
All Comments
First off you like Zillow. I get to ask some very important questions. When I look up a home and find it sold for 189K in 1997 and now its on the market for 660K... I ask is this price justified. The sales history is very justified. I ignore its estimates which are meaningless.
The $100K may be forclosure property.
Back to my orginal problem with Zestimates... lets face some facts... Zillow needs to add a second price line which is the properties longterm value... base 1997 plus inflation. Over the long run RE only keeps up with inflation. Else its a bubble as we see today in SV RE. If anything, Zillow provides a great website where buyers can clearly see how bubbely our RE market is and how much it will correct. FYI im shooting for 50%...
Having said this, I think their RE tools are fantastic and if you claim your house, update your house facts, hand pick the comps and basically feed more & better data to Zillow, then it definitely lets you do something that there was no way for normal people (like me!) to do easily before they came around.
50% RE correction... You'd have to be in a very, very unlucky market where most people were sub-prime borrowers and they all happened to foreclose around the same time! Won't happen in my market but maybe in yours?