Zillow: Stupid and Inaccurate
I didn’t want to talk about this when I had a condo on the market, but Zillow.com sucks. You may have heard of it — it’s an online tool that purports to estimate the market value of any home in its database. But don’t believe it. Zillow provides wildly inaccurate estimates of home values.
When we had our condo on the market, Zillow claimed that our condo was worth $85,000 less than our asking price. (We got asking price.) At the time we bought our current house, it claimed that it was worth some $450,000 more than we paid for it. (Now that our sale price is reflected on the site, Zillow’s estimate of our home’s value has edged back down to only $190,000 more than we paid.)
Don’t get me wrong — we felt like we got a good deal on both ends. But not that good a deal.
P.S. Where Zillow does come in handy is in invading your neighbors’ privacy. Want to know what your neighbor paid for his house? No problem! You need not befriend him and ask personal questions. Just stick his address into Zillow! You’ll have instant online access to records that were previously available only to those who paid a long and bureaucracy-filled visit to the recorder’s office.
It’s a brave new world.
Sales/purchase prices have always been public record, and have been available on the Internets for some time. Zillow’s not new in this respect.
Xrlq (909d74) — 5/12/2006 @ 6:42 amHow is Zillow any more privacy-invading than the NSA’s data-mining effort?
Bradley J. Fikes (e619fc) — 5/12/2006 @ 7:10 amput yourself in zillow’s shoes for a moment. are you more interested in providing accurate numbers to casual surfers, or developing ad revenue from your website?
assistant devil's advocate (564b05) — 5/12/2006 @ 7:48 amI am very impressed by Zillow. Click on the link where you can get the comparables and figure out why Zillow was off.
Zillow can’t estimate view quality, which is huge part of Palos Verdes valuation. (The homes on the other side of my street have a blufftop ocean view, and I have a nice view of the back of their houses.) Otherwise, it does exactly what real estate appraisors do, which is why it is going to put them out of business.
TomHynes (47e7b9) — 5/12/2006 @ 8:22 amZillow is off on my homes value by around 300k. Nothing in my neighborhood sells for the Zillow recomended pricing. Zillow claims my house is worth approx 1.02mm yet it appraised at that in 05, and comps sold within the last month in my area are hitting 1.4 – 1.6mm.
Zillow is about as accurate as Wikipedia
Gabriel Chapman (6d7447) — 5/12/2006 @ 10:16 amI think Zillow varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, really. While the value of my home appears to be inflated, it was within 3,000 of the recent appraisal value of my parents’ house, and within 5,000 of the sales price of other homes on their block….
caltechgirl (fbed6f) — 5/12/2006 @ 11:18 amYep, Zillow is pretty inaccurate. My house has fluctuated $250K over the last month for virtually no reason. Also check out the customize feature. When I went in and changed the number of bedrooms from 4 to 5 (the actual number in our house) the value dropped by $200K. Ridiculous.
The birds-eye, oblique angle photos are pretty cool for the truly nosy. Wonder what your neighbor is growing in that secluded corner of the back yard? Just fiddle with the angle and zoom in. My house has some strange car pulling into the driveway in one of the views. I was ready to give my wife the third degree until I figured out the pictures are a few years old and from before we bought it. Just kidding, honey!
Jeff C. (29f726) — 5/12/2006 @ 12:20 pmHey, I love Zillow, even though it’s off on my house, too… shows about 350,000 lower.
I just got my 25th reunion college book & spent last night looking up old friends & boyfriends… thanks to Zillow (& ridiculous southern California real estate market) even the “too low” estimate is more than all of my ex-boyfriends.
Susan (361bc3) — 5/12/2006 @ 1:57 pmIt doesn’t have a value for mine but it was only built 1 1/2 years ago. The satellite photo is seriously cool though.
Dwilkers (a1687a) — 5/12/2006 @ 2:05 pmRe #4 –
The views are beautiful. I know that my six years of winding through the public school system were definitely some of the worst I can remember. Arrogant rich kids, wall to wall. Kids on Paseo del Mar actually considered RPV the local ghetto. I think it’s different now with more of a racial mix (not that that matters)… but if I had kids, I wouldn’t fight to put them through said school system. On the other hand, there’s far worse out there so it’s all relative.
The best thing is the real estate, and houses that went for the low-50s are now at a million. Anyone who can get a foothold on California real estate today… hats off to you.
Vermont Neighbor (a9ae2c) — 5/12/2006 @ 3:04 pmThe posting of real estate sale prices from the Assessor’s office is feature, not a bug. Making such public information accessible on the Internet reduces the chances that either buyers or sellers may be screwed by their own ignorance. Predatory traders may complain, but the rest of us (who may only participate in such deals once or twice in a lifetime) may be seen happily smiling.
Insufficiently Sensitive (8e7155) — 5/12/2006 @ 5:49 pmI compared twenty Zillow prices in my neighborhood to the county assessor’s own figures, which are easily available online, and the differences were almost always attributable to the state’s cap law: the assessor cannot raise the assessed value of any property more than 5 percent in a given year if its ownership remains unchanged.
Still, Zillow doesn’t handle intangibles well: you can’t learn much about a neighborhood by clicking on the little house icons.
CGHill (43e777) — 5/12/2006 @ 9:44 pmEven with the above mentioned inaccuracies, Zillow is still a great site. The zoom-in aerial views of your own home are worth it right there.
Anyone had enough of the amazing, unstoppable reach of technology? (just kidding)
Vermont Neighbor (a9ae2c) — 5/12/2006 @ 9:57 pmJust checked – we’re about to sell our house for $25-75K below the Zillow value of every house on our block (even ones that presumably haven’t done nearly the upgrades to the interior we have), after two months on the market and a very drastic reduction in the asking price. That probably says more about Zillow not keeping up with a rapidly cratering market than anything else, though.
Crank (3fed2a) — 5/15/2006 @ 6:45 pmAccording to Zillow, my house is worh $550k but the neighbor 4 doors down with the exact same model is mysteriously worth $700k. The difference is zillow is using the sale price I paid for the house 9 years ago…..horribly inaccurate
Bob (6fc4b9) — 5/20/2006 @ 12:19 pm[…] Zillow’s taken a beating lately, so it’s worth noting that in my case it was dead-on. Escrow finally closed on my old house today, for a sale price of $699,900. Zillow’s current estimate? $705,028. At the time we entered the sale contract, it was even closer; about $700 shy of the sales price. […]
damnum absque injuria » Zillow: Not Complete Bull Zhit (38c04c) — 6/6/2006 @ 3:29 pmZillow Zucks!!!! The house next door, identical in every way including square footage, shows at 75k more than mine. What a POS
Scout (59bfb8) — 6/12/2006 @ 9:13 amZillow apparently has a serious flaw when valuing houses of senior citizens who have frozen their appraised values when neighboring houses go up in appraised value. Zillow seems to drop the frozen house’s value drastically because the tax assessment of a house is weighted heavily in their super secret formula. Also, if your house has not sold in recent years, and your neighbor’s has your value will be less for this fact alone, from what I see.
Tony (314080) — 11/17/2006 @ 8:30 pmIf someone thinks Zillow.com will eventually replace appraisals, they need to put down the crack pipe and stop shooting up clorox. Zillow “offers” this “service” to make money from companies that advertise on their website which is fine (business is business) but to those that hold Zillow as the final word in the real estate biz, is more confused than the Bush Administration.
JFK (9c7c9a) — 11/30/2006 @ 2:18 pm“Guess-Idiots” at Zillow use outdated public records to formulate real estate valuations. They call those wild calculations – Zestimates. I thinks it’s best to use a trained professional appraiser.
Ron Asteak (d106a8) — 7/30/2007 @ 8:12 pmI’m not at all impressed with Zillows accuracy…Actually I think they suck and I’ll tell you why….Last month I went to see my mortgage broker about getting an equity line set up…He told me how much $$$ he was able to establish and I said thats too low…His reply, well the lender ran the numbers using Zillow and they appraised your house for near a $100k less than you told me the house was worth…I asked WTH are you talking about…He said Zillow estimated your home at only $325k…Now, my next door neighbor with a house 225 sq feet smaller than mine just sold theirs for $430k and yet mines worth $105k less according to zillow… BS! This is junk science at it’s finest!
SCB (de5f98) — 8/4/2007 @ 8:43 pmnone of these avm’s are accurate
luca (1c8ec2) — 8/7/2007 @ 6:47 pmHomegain has been at it for seven years and their’s is still off
so is cyberhomes, realestate abc, reply and so many others why bother with Zillow?
Zillow is horrible because it does not take into account the area, the number of stories of the house or amenities, etc. All it does is grab houses of same size and make them comps. In Vegas, this is a horrible mistake because 1 story value completely different than 2 story, etc. I wish zillow would just publish the range and not a Zestimate. Too many buyers take the Zestimate as more accurate than a real comp review by agents. When you take Zillow, ABC and others, you can get a rnge of tens of thousands in difference.
vegas (6c8a92) — 10/29/2007 @ 6:22 am