Zillow
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I could not find my own home, probably because it's too remote. But I checked on some others in cities, and they're there. The numbers in my small sample seemed close enough. The NPR segment goes into some detaila about how they come up with these numbers.
Marshall
I heard about Zillow last night on NPR as well. It sounded like a great idea, so I checked some houses in my neighborhood. I was not impressed. The numbers didn't seem right to me. For instance, there is a townhome near mine that sold in december for 208k. According to Zillow, this house is worth 235k. If you're interested in comps in your neighborhood, try using [url href=http://domania.com]domania[/url]. You can enter an address, and it will give you sales prices in that neighborhood, and stats on the houses. Very useful tool.
_kirk
One thing I really like about Zillow is that it's anonymous. While domania is also free, it's really more of a prospect harvesting tool. Here's what I got back when they could not find my property:
Thank you for requesting your free home valuation from Domania. Currently we do not have enough information to compile an accurate report for you. However, your real estate agent will be able to assist you and provide you the requested information. They will be in touch with you shortly.
I'd hate to be the real estate agent on the other end of the form I submitted.
Marshall
I checked our last three houses on Zillow. Two were close - our current one was wildly off by nearly 30%, so I'm very skeptical. I was tempted to check some Frank Lloyd Wright and Neutra properties for a laugh.
I don't really see the value of Zillow unless you are going to sell a house yourself. Your agent should be pulling comparison pricing for you.
I think the value is that you can get another data point, but obviously you have to take it for what it's worth (after all, it's free), But that's sometimes not much different from using a realtor to get the same information. Today I was talking with a client that had two different realtors give them two very different numbers on the value of their home ($575K and $775K -- !). They were looking for a third opinion. I suggested Zillow (and now will suggest alternatives, with all the appropriate caveats). for what it's worth, Zillow returned a value quite close to one of the other realtor's answer.
What I can't figure out is how they will make money from this. Well, I haven't really tried. But it's from the same guy that started Expedia.
MArshall
it seemed about right on for my property, however my neighbors house seemed way high. the funny thing about it was that when i went into the detial portion to give the specs of my house it actually dropped the value quite a bit, almost $30000. I guess it's like google earth, something fun to play with but not take too seriously.
One other comment on domania... It sounds like you tried the Value Check. I haven't actually done that, because, as you say, it does seem like a prospect harvesting tool. Try using the Home Price Check, this will give you home sales prices in the specified neighborhood. Of course, if you have no neighbors, it probably won't do much for you.
_kirk
Zillow only returned county property tax data and tax assessment value. no comps. so it is not useful for my area so far. Domania had a couple recent sales but not good enough comps.
I checked my neighborhood and quickly reached the conclusion that it was doing nothing more than posting the last transaction price. I am seeing comparable houses, one with a value of 350k, and another with a value of 150k. The value on our house was roughly what we paid for it 14 years ago while generally values in the neighborhood have doubled.
I'm not impressed.
I was looking at a renovation/addition project I'm working on and it seemed fairly accurate. I'm not sure where or how it compiles its data, but it was fairly close to what I think the project would be had it not caught on fire almost a year ago. I'll truly be interested in what it says in amonth when the project should be complete.
Mark Meyer
[quote:lavardera format=text/plain]I checked my neighborhood and quickly reached the conclusion that it was doing nothing more than posting the last transaction price. I am seeing comparable houses, one with a value of 350k, and another with a value of 150k. The value on our house was roughly what we paid for it 14 years ago while generally values in the neighborhood have doubled.
I'm not impressed.[/quote]
that's not holding true for my area, which isn't too far from yours, it's showing about 30K higher than my purchase price.
In my neighborhood houses are listed at about 1/2 of what they have been selling for. Granted that the 1/2 is the sane price vs- the excited selling we've been seeing lately.
I hope to hell that it's not correct...it has our new property valued at $115,000 less than we paid for it!
(and that's before these damn renovations!)
Fran
ugh. rotten data. and few properties listed in my area.
The closest one to my home had a correct street address and zip code, but the wrong city name. So, all of the comp data was for a little community that is 30 minutes away.
good luck to Zillow...
It was pretty dead on for my neighborhood. There were a few exceptions and anomalies, but that is only to be expected.
There is a house on my street that was only listed to be worth $300K, but I know that it is worth at least double that. It is probably due to the fact that the house has never been sold (third generation is living there now) and there is no information on the home.
I think that the house value graphs are the better tool of the site. At least you can somewhat see how the typical rate of growth is in your area.
Even with its problems, its still a cool site.
This site is pretty dead on for the Eichler neighborhoods I specialize in. I think it works best if homes are in a tract of like homes. It looks like the site is estimating more recent sales prices in the neighborhoods and adding a percentage according to trends. I did notice the value estimates for the homes sold in 2005 were a little too high since there was a percentage added to them as well. Overall this is an awesome site and it is a great idea to use this to be sure you and your realtor are on the same page when it comes time to sell. It is not however as accurate as the Market Analysis an agent uses which takes far more things into consideration. The site should only be used as a guide and it is fun to use for those who want a quick check on their homes value.
I thought that I heard somewhere that the data was from property tax information. Probably adjusted from that. I found it to be very generally in the right ballpark.
Ditech.com also has similar data. These sites are actually fun to check periodically to see the fluctuations. Usually in December/January the prices will go down and then come back up.
Fun and informative but not useful for actually pricing houses... that is what appraisers are for.
The way the site plots houses is strange. It's off by a considerable amount in mapping the houses in my neighborhood. It's the correct street, but it's plotting me and all my neighbors about a half-mile up the road (past several curves -- so it's not just grid mis-alignment). The data seem to be plain old tax-assessment records, which our local paper provides in an online database. (For those who think the values in their area look low, this may be one reason -- tax assessments typically lag behind sales prices, especially in the go-go market of the past several years.)
Another recommendation dropped in my inbox by Yahoo! (hey! sometimes they are good..) was this one: [url href=http://www.benengebreth.org/housingtracker/]Housing Tracker[/url]. I don't really need a tool like this but maybe this one might be helpful to some of you.
Jonii
Pilgrim,
I wouldn't worry too much about the low accuracy of the house locations on Zillow. They seem to be plotting home addresses based on an addressable centerline data layer. (Each street line is broken into segments with ranges of address numbers, and a point is located using the number and the name of the street. More than likely this is the TIGER file created for the Census, because it is the only consistent nationwide addressable street file. TIGER was created at a national scale with no reference photography underneath, so it's always a bit off when it is viewed with photography. It looks okay if you are zoomed out to the level of a USGS topo quad (commonly used for hiking maps), but at the neighborhood level it's terrible. The location of the dot with the house value on Zillow is not affected by the crappy accuracy of the street data, because the numeric information is tied to the address (not the true location in space), and the database relationship remains true despite the spatial discrepancy.
Probably more than you wanted to know, but what's the point of being a full time GIS user if you can't whip out the random technical knowledge evey now and then?
As a professional mapping geek, I think web applications like Zillow, YahooMaps, and GoogleEarth are great because they put one of the most powerful developments of the information economy (GIS) into the hands of people everywhere. A massive database of information is much more fun and useful when you can put it on a map, and that's exactly what a Geographic Information System allows you to do. And it's even better if it's on the web for free!
Jenny
i think is a good tool. im in the mortgage business so, in order to check the accuracy i compared some appraisals we had with the values that zillow proposed. it was pretty accurate indeed.
remember that these systems use county records more likely and the way they asses value is they compare the actual house with recent sales of similar houses (by similar i mean similar sq ft lot bedroom and bathroom count, year built and distance).
house conditions, ammenities, design, etc. don't count
i think this is a good tool in the low to mid end of the market were the spread between a cheap house and expensive house (assuming same sq ft) is not especially big
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