Please bear in mind, I dont have anything against Zillow as a service, it is a pretty-cool tool. I just dont agree with their Zestimate tool. For a variety of reasons, some listed below:
- First of all, it is not a standard published formula. Why are they hiding it?
- It is totally flawed because it does not have current data.
- It affect the sellers, essentially because they spent thousands on home improvements and it is never reflected in their calculations
- They dont publish the source of their information
- People blindly believe their Zestimate and negotiate based on that data
- It looks like it is a lotto number, they pick some random number and proclaim that is the suggested sales price. E.g. A property listed on their site has the range of 700K to 950K, Zestimate is at 800K (why?), Owner has to correct all data except the year the house was built
- how can you trust such baloney?
I would like to invite all of my fellow bloggers to start a campaign to address this issue.
Some would say this is free speech. How is this free speech? If it is they should be able to defend it with the parameters they use to generate the house-value. What is there to hide? There are things like this that exist already, it is called suggested market value.
