Real Estate: Zillow Wants to Flip Your House

[Michael]

davester wrote:
[quote=Michael]
Our Zillow estimate seems to be based on our property taxes.

No, that's not what it's based on. Just go to the Zillow help site and there is a detailed explanation of how "Zestimates" are made.

Michael wrote: We have thought of selling and the Zillow estimate concerns me because people seem to go there first nowadays. So, I've gone in and changed our property description on Zillow to show a very minimum status of the house (no finished driveway, 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 1 story, no garage-that kind of thing). I figure that anybody looking at a picture of the house (clearly 2 stories with a concrete driveway and a garage and it's over 3000 sq ft) will know the Zillow description is faulty and so will discount the Zillow estimate of the value of the house. But, who knows...

That makes no sense to me. Most people shopping for houses will just look at the Estimate, not the house details. Therefore your gaming of the system will have the opposite effect to what you are wanting.
I dunno. The estimate is almost exactly what the property value is on the county website. Our neighbor next door with a slightly smaller house in living space and no basement is valued at $120,000 more than ours. All of the other houses on the street are valued at least $80,000 more than ours. I checked a half dozen of them and they are valued at almost exactly the county property value amounts. When I bring up our house it shows a picture and in big print right below it says, "1 Bed, 1 Bath, 581 sqft" in right next to the estimated value. Above that is a picture of the house showing 2 stories and being pretty big. The specific details are below that and I don't anticipate that people would necessarily be looking at that. But it's hard to miss the headline next to the estimated value.

I don't view this as trying to game the system but rather being involved in a system without my permission that is clearly faulty, at least in my case. And that faulty system likely impacting the eventual sales price of my house. I'm just trying to reduce that probability of a negative impact on the real sales value of our house. But, I've been wrong before!

[Will Collier]

People I talk to in that business (realtors and tax assessors) sneer at Zillow, at least as far as its accuracy.

I've gotten a couple of "Hey, I want to buy your house" cold calls recently, I assume as a matter of course that they're scams. Maybe the next time I'll take the call and tell them my offer is 3X the value, as-is, with the buyer paying all my moving costs (I have no interest in selling, and negative interest in moving)....