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Originally Posted by VickiR
First of all...I disagree with Zillow on about 99% of my listings and the homes that I sell. They basically get their information from the county website, which often has the incorrect square footage.
Vicki
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Here's some more information on Zillow. I've posted a few clips from the entire article which I found worthwhile.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/re...=1&oref=slogin
...Zillow.com, which was inaugurated last February, uses flashy maps imposed on color aerial photographs of neighborhoods, and gives estimated values for individual houses.
After the start of Zillow.com, a handful of sites cropped up offering similar services.
Within a month, even the giant Realtor.com, which in recent years had not offered the sale prices of comparable listings online, had a new feature on its front page that gave consumers a starting point to assess their property values.
Allan Dalton, president and chief executive of Realtor.com, said that the feature had already been in the works, and that the start of Zillow “reinforced that we had the right plan.”
Realtor.com, which works in partnership with the National Association of Realtors, designed the feature to help a seller find an agent who could give a professional assessment of the value of a property, not simply state a value.
“If you tell a house seller that a home value is preordained, the home seller is not going to seek someone to get the best price,” Mr. Dalton said. “We represent both the homes and the professional. At the end of the day, people need to have expert advice.”
This approach differs from that of sites like Zillow.com, whose goal is to attract an audience for its information and to sell advertising on the basis of the size of that audience.
Within a few months of its opening, however, Zillow attracted some unwelcome attention. In October, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit consumer group in Washington, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that contended that inaccurate valuations on the site, both high and low, were damaging the interests of all consumers and particularly the interests of working families.
The complaint has yet to be resolved, but a spokeswoman for Zillow was careful to point out the site’s disclaimers.
“We’re a starting point,” said the spokeswoman, Amanda Hoffman. “We’re not a crystal ball. It’s the Internet. You sort of have to take everything you read on the Internet with a grain of salt.”...
...As an extension of pure data about communities, Realtor.com is planning to add some consumer opinion, a feature that follows somewhat in the style of online retailers like Amazon.com. ...
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Just looking at the average of all these areas together doesn't give you an accurate picture of home sales, even if the data used to create the median value is correct. Big "if" there, too.
