what do you think about Zillow?

16 years ago

I know Zillow is not always reliable but in our area it usually is pretty accurate on its estimates. In our ZipCode all recently sold 4-bedroom-homes sold between at or significantly below the current Zillow estimate - none was sold above in the last 12 months (out of about 50 sold houses) . That said, we made an offer for a house (6 months on the market now) that seems to be overpriced to begin with 6 % below asking - 2 % under Zillows estimate. Our offer was countered at Zillows estimate from last week. Not a huge different percentwise but houses here are just under on Million so a lot of $ amount still. But when we checked Zillow again today the estimate for the last 30 days went down 8% - being even 6% under our offer. Now we feel even more that our inital offer was a good offer and are hesistant to throw more money out... Any thoughts anyone? Thank you!

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Comments (7)

fairygirl43
16 years ago
Having been on Zillow boards for a while (usually the sellers side), most agree that Zillow estimates are inaccurate at best and should never be used for anything. You should base your information on actual sold comps (from the last 3 months) for your area. If you have an REA, they should be able to give you this information.
cordovamom
16 years ago
100% agree with fairygirl....Zillow isn't accurate at all in our area as a matter of fact they're not even accurate on sold prices either in our area. Use recent sold comps from your realtor to help you determine a fair offer.
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mfbenson
16 years ago
Zillow doesn't even get national averages right - you can check this yourself by clicking on the price history for your house, and comparing to the US average. Its off by about 5% compared to news articles, and that's using the largest possible sample size. Narrowing it down to a particular neighborhood seems to increase the margin of error by a factor of ten.
chisue
16 years ago
Zillow is a terrible waste of time in our area. All RE is 'local'. Zillow's computer doesn't recognize that houses within sight of one another can be in vastly different price brackets.

Get actual, recent sold comps and even an appraisal. This is big money and worth the investment to be prepared. Do you even want to buy now, in a declining market? How will you feel if it drops another 6% AFTER you buy?
theroselvr
16 years ago
You also have to take into account whether you're actually looking at the correct house in question. Our whole street is numbered wrong, even after I claimed my house and moved the marker; it is not right. The funny thing is Zillow says it gets it's info from 3 sources all of which show my street correctly.

The next thing was the "Zestimate" of our house which really ticked me off. Here is a handy mans special across the street "Zestimated" more then ours :( ... the house next door sold a year ago, they did not move in for a "good" 6 months, yet that house is also "Zestimated" above ours. It's a close comp to ours but is much smaller. Neither of these houses have central air, new furnace, roof, hot water heater, windows (I'll stop, sure you get the drift).

I don't doubt buyers have been looking at our Zillow page as we've had a lot of views. I ended up spending some time there and was able to bring our Zestimate up by entering our updates. Hopefully now that we're ready to sell it will help.

I wouldn't put too much trust in Zillow or any of these sites that get general information from tax records. As was mentioned the best way to find what you should offer is to have an agent run comps. Once you make an offer and agree on a price, an appraiser will come out; hopefully it will appraise correctly.
gin_gin
16 years ago
I sure hope buyers (what few there are around here) aren't putting any stock in "zestimates". If they do I'm in trouble, the Zestimate for our house was $424,000 in December. A couple of weeks later in beginning of Jan. it was down to $399,000! Now it's back up a bit to $403,500.
Happyladi
16 years ago
Zillow says my 2 bathroom house has only 1 bathroom.

what do you think about Zillow?

Comments (7)

fairygirl43

cordovamom

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