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Any informed opinions on how accurate the house value of your own house is on Zillow?
I only have 2 places upon which I have experience with them, but in both cases their estimates of my current houses value seems high...at times ridiculously high...like now. I'd say based on what is on the market now in my area, that their estimate is in the neighborhood of 25% too high.
Am I alone here, or is this fairly representative? I'd LOVE for it to be true...
If you have real recent sales data, then you could simply compare those to the Zillow. For example, from Redfin in CA you can download spreadsheets of recent sales data and compute average the $/sqft. You could even fine tune that by examining some of the high and low $/sqft values to determine what made them high and low (for example amenities, larger lot, view lot, cul de sac, etc.)
If there are a lot of available comps for a given area and it's somewhat homogenous (ie...the houses don't differ greatly from one to the next like cookie cutter neighborhoods) and the neighborhood is somewhat stable in price (not like a lot of these places that have had huge flexuations in property value in recent years) I'd say the estimates are somewhat reasonable.
Our home in Fort Worth was valued at $X we managed to sell it for $X - $3k in a down market. We took $X to be it's value aproximately 3-6 months prior to the housing meltdown. I don't think it really has a good chance of predicting the property value up to the minute. At best it's lagging a few months.
I have heard others say that zillow was lightyears away from being accurate on their home though....usually it was a result of high market volitility or not enough comp data....and in some cases inaccurate data.
Initially Zillow had our home listed as 1600sqft and 3 bdrm. In reality it was 2000 sq ft and 4 bdrms. We had no idea why it was listed that way but we as the owners of the property were able to edit the information.
Most of the listings I have seen on Zillow post your tax valuation and a guess at the market value--not very accurate. Plus, what's to say that the information they have on your house is correct. Our house is listed as having 3 bedrooms, we have 4, 1400 sq feet, we have 3600 and one bathroom, we have 3 1/2. It isn't even close.
The only way you really know the 'value' of your house is to sell it and see how much someone will pay for your house.
Our county allows online access to home tax assessments. That won't tell you what your house will sell for, but it will give you the tax assessor's value of it. Essentially your house is worth what someone else would pay for it if you were selling it. That's about it.
This question was asked in the Real Estate forums here. Not one single Realtor had one good thing about Zillow. By reading the answers here thus far, non Realtors have nothing good to say about it either.
Zillow is worse than useless. Every single place I have lived, or seriously looked into buying a home I looked up on Zillow and the numbers are all over the board, and none were even close to what was actually happening in those markets.
For example one of the homes I own is currently over valued on Zillow(compared to what homes are selling for) by 50%.
My other homes "Zestimate" is off by about 40k.
Its laughable they send me emails all the time..."your property is up (or down) by 2.3 %" and nothing comparable has sold in the area in MONTHS!!!
That other site Trulia, I think it is...had one of my houses still listed as a resale 18 months after closing because the listing agent never bothered to remove the post. It may very well still be listed "for sale" on there. I won't use either site for an real information.
JMHO
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