Zillow
Posted February 10th, 2006 @ 11:20am by Erik J. Barzeski
I just checked the "value" of my home on Zillow.com (Mac users: use Firefox. Safari is not yet supported). It's "valued" at about $8k less than Carey and I paid for it. But that value is seasonal, too: I checked the graphs and the home was worth $18k more than Carey and I paid for it in August of last year (we bought in April/May).
In a way, the site is kinda creepy… yet I wish I'd had it when Carey and I were looking for our house. It wouldn't have changed our decision at all, but it's still interesting.
Donate Life
Posted 10 Feb 2006 at 12:25pm #
According to Zillow, my 2 bedroom, 1000 sq ft house has 4 bedrooms and is 1500 sq ft. I decided to fix the data and get at my real house value (it seemed a bit inflated), and somehow my smaller house was worth 20k more? Doesn't make any sense to me.
Posted 10 Feb 2006 at 12:33pm #
Before: "Miscellaneous" residence, 4 BR, 2.5 B, 6 rooms, 2 stories, 1957 SF, 1991, "Unknown" Roof: $184,073.
After: "Single family" residence, 4 BR, 2.5 B, 7 rooms, 2 stories, 2411 SF, 1991, "Shingle composition" Roof, $408,632
Uhhh, yeah…
Posted 10 Feb 2006 at 12:37pm #
Would you really want to inform the world? Up here in Canada, our property taxes are tied to property value. I wouldn't want the government to know about anything that significantly changes the value of my home; not until I sell, at least.
Posted 10 Feb 2006 at 1:14pm #
Zillow is still in beta.
Posted 10 Feb 2006 at 2:31pm #
Tom, American property taxes in most communities are based on property value as well. Most cities have an assessor whose job it is to determine the values of homes. Homes are periodically re-assessed based on improvements to the property as well as the changing value of property within the city. I doubt that the government can use a private corporation's assessment of your land value as the data on which they base their property taxes.
Besides, in the United States at least, the value of your proerty is already public information, so this site isn't really opening any more up to the world than is already publically available.
Posted 11 Feb 2006 at 11:04pm #
Well, I don't know if I should feel bad or not...but that site shows that the house we sold 6 months ago is worth $200K (yes $200K) more than we sold it for. It doesn't have a "Zestimate" for our current home.
I doubt we could have gotten a penny more for it than we did, since our old house was easily $300K more than nearly every other house on the street. Interesting site. It wouldn't have helped much when we were house hunting since it doesn't appear to know much about my new home town.
Erik knows my old house story...but for anyone else, link is in my name.
Posted 15 Feb 2006 at 9:04am #
Out of 6 homes I have entered already, only one "assesment" was somewhat close. Not one of the 6 had accurate info on number of Beds, baths sq ft etc.
I wouldnt depend on this just yet.
Posted 15 Feb 2006 at 12:52pm #
Check out their accuracy info page. They brag about being within 10% of the actual value more than 50% of the time. Translation: on a $400,000 home half the time they are within $40k and the other 50% ...???? I dont know about you but 40k is a lot of money to me. People complain about Realtor fees of 6%!!!! On the good side, in add'l steps, you can choose your own comparables that you know more closely match your home and you will get a much more accurate figure.
Posted 26 Feb 2006 at 10:26pm #
With broadband and 512megs RAM Zillow's paging performance is terrible the last few days.
Some pages stop loading.
Too many concurrent hits or.........poor programing with their "Beta" version.
I also think there values are WAY off from our local market.
The Zestimater edit feature will not load on many attempts at different sessions.
They've got work to do if this site will be accepted.
Bill Over
Stuart, FL
Posted 26 Jan 2007 at 9:59am #
[quote comment="18259"]Would you really want to inform the world? Up here in Canada, our property taxes are tied to property value. I wouldn't want the government to know about anything that significantly changes the value of my home; not until I sell, at least.[/quote]
They seem to be primarily using tax data for home data, and then adjusting for local neighborhood sales effects (ie. the gov't already knows!)