Comments on: Zillow Zestimate Review

By: Portland Oregon Real Estate

Portland Oregon Real Estate — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 23:06:03 +0000

I use some zillow tools on my site. It works great. But ultimately clients still need a pro to get the correct value. I think zillow is a great tool for sellers just thinking about selling.

By: fivecentnickel.com

fivecentnickel.com — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 15:10:23 +0000

No data for my street. It’s pretty new (the houses are 3-4 years old), but still…

By: Mandy

Mandy — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 01:34:07 +0000

One thing I noticed was that depending on the areas I was looking at, some of the zestimates were pretty far below the actual selling prices of homes. I know for a fact that it was off by more than a million dollars on my parents house (they live in one of the most expensive housing markets in California) and it didn’t list many of the comps in the area that I know sold for multi-millions of dollars.

But still a pretty impressive tool.

By: Caitlin

Caitlin — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 23:01:03 +0000

I helped build a valuation tool back when I worked at domania.com (before they just sold mortgages) and I was impressed with Zillow's beta launch (well, once it was actually up) I think they are doing something that is extremely difficult to do, and I think they will ultimately do it well. A lot of folks say they are unimpressed, but it's not clear if they did the "customize" step or not (like to fix incorrect square footage, to update with home improvements etc) since I found THAT step to have the most impact -both in bringing the zestimate on target and wowee factor.

By: Jose

Jose — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:10:57 +0000

Added a review of it on my website: Review at Money and Investing

By: FMF

FMF — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:44:30 +0000

I tried yesterday and it was swamped — wouldn’t let me in. Seems like they may have a lot of start-up issues.

By: claire

claire — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 21:13:38 +0000

I was disappointed, but I’m hoping it will get better rather quickly. Sounds like the launch was a little premature.

By: franky the fsa

franky the fsa — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 14:34:41 +0000

Since I live in NH, they didn’t have any information for my house . I was disappointed.

By: jim

jim — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 22:34:34 +0000

I think in some areas it’s running off stale data, depending how quick your municipality is in recording sales and re-assessments. Did you look at any of the trending and tracking data? I have no idea how to verify it but I bet it’s off sales figures (they can’t possibly make it up and expect not to get discovered)

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 22:27:05 +0000

I gave it a try with my old house which I sold in September of 2005 and my new house. My new house is brand new in a new subdivision. It could not find my new house. The map they show, even showed the subdivision area, but there were no houses there, so I’m not sure how old the data is.

It returned the tax assessed value of my old house which was ~$78k. This is not even near what the house is worth as I sold it for $235k.

Given what I found, I’m not sure I put any credibility into this.