Cool site. I put in the house address of the condo I sold in Arizona in July, and it gave me a chart on what it'd be worth today (bought for 170k in 2002, sold for $315k in July 2005). The interesting thing is the chart it does on the address.
You'll see from this picture one that I think is pretty accurate - a crazy rise for a year (Phoenix got nuts with speculators/flippers) followed by a slight decline since October (when the party stopped and the speculators/flippers went home). It'll be interesting to pull this up in a year and see the utter collapse.
February 12, 2006
Ever use Zillow.com? Here's mine...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I tried it out over the weekend. I have been following a small 3 bedroom cape in ok shape in a fancy Connecticut town for some time. It listed for $750k 8 months ago, then dropped to $715k after 6 months. A month ago it fell to $695k. Zillow.com says its worth a cool million! If its worth so much why cant it sell for $695k?
Crunching the numbers is fine, but because no comparable house has sold in that neighborhood since August, the computer calculation just assumed that the same rate of appreciation has continued since August.
The bottom line is that if a house is on the market for months unable to sell at asking price X, then the house is certainly worth no more than asking price X and probably less! Why can't Zillow.com see this?
I agree. zillow.com gave confusing results when I tried it. It put our our modest house in CT at close to 400,000. We would estimate it at more like 300,000. Then, I tried refining the estimate and put in more details about the house and it produced an estimate of 95,000 (!). What a clumsy robot.
I think zillow will lead home sellers to think their place is worth MUCH more than it is. Computers can't see consumer psyche. Only comps. And what things were like 6 months ago AIN'T what they're like today for sure!
We tried Zillow on two side-by-side, well-known properties in Marin. House 1 is on about 1/4 of an acre; House 2's corner lot is slightly less than half that. House 1 has 2 baths, House 2 has one. Both have garages, neither has a basement. Both have two bedrooms, both built within 3 years of each other. House 2 had some remodeling done, which should be in a permit file, but isn't reflected in the house description. The Zillow valuations were almost $400,000 apart in favor of House 1. Zillow may be overweighting lot size without knowing how much is suitable for building on.
Post a Comment