ZILLOW Estimated Price

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protoss_IHB

New member
Hi,

I just wonder how close is Zillow estimate house price compared to the actual market price. In the old day, we have to go through the Real Estate agent to get a comp. If my friend would like to list his home on the market, should he use the zillow price with a small +/- uncertainty percentage from the market?

Thnks
 
protoss,

Zillow doesn't work well in volatile markets like ours. During the rally, it was consistently low. Lately it has been high, and prices have been all over the place. IMO, the best way to get a feel for the market is to go to Redfin and look at many homes for sale. A few hours of that, and you get a pretty good idea of what is going on. It tends to be biased by "wishing prices," so focus on the least expensive comparables.
 
protoss,

Zillow is a lead generation site. Value is all over the map.

If you want to skip RE agent for comps, I would pay an appraiser for a drive-by appraisal for about $60. A comprehensive one cost around $350.
 
This property was up for auction with $50k opening bid, they use zillow for estimated market value, which was placed at Zestimate $313,505. The property was sold at auction for $131,000:

http://www.williamsauction.com/propertydetails.aspx?propertyId=24066

So you can see Zillow doesn't always work well in volatile markets.

On side note, williamsauction.com doesn't have any Irvine properties for auction, but they do have some in other parts of OC going under the hammer tomorrow. If anyone is curious, you can see the highest bid price in couple of days and compare to current Zillow estimates.
 
A few months back Wall Street Journal did this study on zestimates. They found the median difference between zestimate and actual selling price was 7.8%. However they also found that Zillow on average was not biased either on the high side or the low side. What I took from this is that although Zestimates are not that useful for individual homes, the aggregated Zestimates for zip codes and cities may actually be quite good as a market price tracker.
 
From all the online sites zillow is the one that is closest to being accurate. I'm not saying zillow is accurate but they are better then some others like cyberhomes which is off 13% or more .

The nice thing about zillow is they do allow you to find recently sold properties in your neighborhood and go from there.
 
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