East Bay Blog

I thought that an interesting topic for my East Bay Real Estate blog today would be zillow.com. Zillow.com has become an increasingly popular site in the last year. For those of you that might not be familiar with it, zillow.com is a website which claims to be able to provide you with the value of your home instantly. All you do is type in your address, and out will pop a number, which zillow estimates to be the value of your home. So how accurate is Zillow?

I went on the site and picked a small random sample of homes that I have seen on the market. I input the addresses of these homes and then compared the number that zillow calculated with the number I thought was the fair market value of the home. For the most part zillow.com came within 20% of the value that I had estimated, IF the stat’s they had were correct. That is to say, if the number of bedrooms/bathrooms and square footage it had were correct then it did come within 20%. If any alterations and/or modifications were done to the house, and the changes were not reflected in zillow.com, then the estimates were way off. I believe zillow.com pulls property statistics from county records, so if what you see in zillow is incorrect, chances are the county has incorrect records for your house as well.

After my “test” today, which was based on a small sample of East Bay homes, I would have to say that zillow is a nice tool if you want to get an idea of what your home might be worth. It will give you a ballpark figure, however if you are looking to buy/sell a home, have a professional Realtor® do a market analysis of the property. A 20% price mistake is huge when you are buying/selling a home.

Also, market conditions are extremely important. I have noticed that in a changing market, zillow has tended to be a bit behind the curve. In the “sellers” market a couple of years ago, it seemed to have low prices, and in a “buyers” market, prices seem to be too high. There are many exceptions however. How your home shows is something zillow cannot calculate, and whether a home has been upgraded or not is something zillow would not know.  If your home has significant modifications I would shy away from using it to get a value altogether.

Again, these are just my opinions, and are based on a small sample that I used in my “test”. If you want to see how it works, check it out for yourself.