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Very interesting article in the Raleigh N&O today. Be sure to look at the "WHAT'S HIS LAKE NORMAN HOME WORTH?" insert on the left side of the page. It shows a listed home of $900K and how online valuation sites "guesses" ranged by over $400K.
Web offers guesstimates on home value - Home - News & Observer (http://www.newsobserver.com/front/story/1381047.html - broken link)
Very interesting article in the Raleigh N&O today. Be sure to look at the "WHAT'S HIS LAKE NORMAN HOME WORTH?" insert on the left side of the page. It shows a listed home of $900K and how online valuation sites "guesses" ranged by over $400K.
Web offers guesstimates on home value - Home - News & Observer (http://www.newsobserver.com/front/story/1381047.html - broken link)
Bill,
You stole my thunder. I was thinking of posting this.
Oh, well. The article is blog fodder anyway.
These sites mislead people and people think they are nearly gospel when the sites have no licensing or ethics restrictions.
I liked the note on how some sites pair a customer with an agent. They find an agent who has paid or agreed to pay for introductions.
Great selection process: Sell the customer to the highest bidder after you lie to them about what a property is worth.
Gotta hope a slow market takes a few of these sites down.
I'm not trying to be devil's advocate, but I read the article really hoping that they would compare the price at which a property had recently sold to it's online valuation. Instead, they give two examples in which the agent says a house is worth a certain amount, and compare that to the online valuation. That means very little to me.
I agree that online valuation sites are extremely unreliable. Not only are their stats on the home often incorrect, but no online service can get in there to see if the floor plan is choppy, how bad or good the interior light is, whether or not the kitchen is cut off from the family room, how much cabinet space there is, how big the master bedroom is, whether or not there's a 3-story apartment building towering over the back yard, etc. All of those things affect market value, and that's why online valuation tools can be very misleading.
However, how hard would it have been, for that article, to pull up recent SOLDS - the true definition of current market value - and compare those to online valuations? And why didn't they?
I'm not trying to be devil's advocate, but I read the article really hoping that they would compare the price at which a property had recently sold to it's online valuation. Instead, they give two examples in which the agent says a house is worth a certain amount, and compare that to the online valuation. That means very little to me.
I agree that online valuation sites are extremely unreliable. Not only are their stats on the home often incorrect, but no online service can get in there to see if the floor plan is choppy, how bad or good the interior light is, whether or not the kitchen is cut off from the family room, how much cabinet space there is, how big the master bedroom is, whether or not there's a 3-story apartment building towering over the back yard, etc. All of those things affect market value, and that's why online valuation tools can be very misleading.
However, how hard would it have been, for that article, to pull up recent SOLDS - the true definition of current market value - and compare those to online valuations? And why didn't they?
Why?
Because it is "journalism." The root of "journalism" is from the Greek for "Incomplete."
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