Zillow accuracy evaluated

[Tom4value]

Garbage in, garbage out. Zillow is a glorified statistical program. Live in So. Cal or anywhere that you have mainly neighborhoods where tract houses are all the same and coming home drunk and trying to find your house is really a thing, with lots of sales? Yeah, Zillow is pretty accurate.

Live in the country or older communities with odd houses and very little sales activity? Zillow is worthless.

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

Since Zillow is incapable of differentiating a home on acreage from a poultry farm on acreage (i postd this elsewhere) you get some pretty bizarre results. How does this happen? Pretty easy. The tax card shows about 40 acres with 3 poultry barns and a house. But the seller sold only about 20 acres with only the poultry house. The 2,200 SF house is a double wide to boot and the idea it brought $500/SF is crazy. The poultry barns OTOH, are about 60,000 SF and $20/SF. Zillow couldn't tell the difference and didn't know how to value it as what the MLS sold was obvious about - the house didn't go with the sale.

 

[Fernando]

Zillow is made for residential. Not chicken farms.

 

[J Grant]

Garbage in, garbage out. Appraisers spend a LOT of time qualifying their data prior to actually analyzing for value. Not only for the subject attributes but also for the comp selection itself (which can inform an AVM) and by driving the comps to put an eyeball on them.

IMO that's what makes the GSE AVMs different from all the others - they're using appraiser data. If they have 4 appraisals on file for a particular property it won't even make any difference if one of them is squishy with their descriptions and ratings.

But by the time they run an avm on the property, the appraisals are usually old. The subject data might be better than what another company has, but the comps teh appraiser used 3 years ago (or however old the last appraisal was ) are no longer relevant and its the same problem - nobody is going to qualify the new data wrt comps and comp choices or analyze - Its stil an AVM

 

[Dublin ohio]

Zillow is made for residential. Not chicken farms.

So why are they valuing chicken farms?

 

[Fernando]

So why are they valuing chicken farms?

That's what I said. Zillow doesn't value chicken farms.

 

[James Mpls]

I got a “ding” on a “correction request” the other day where the reviewer wanted me to address how Comparable 3’s GLA did not match that of Zillow. ‍‍Luckily I successfully “challenged” the ridiculous request, by sending a copy of the MLS listing in with the appraisal…

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

Zillow is made for residential. Not chicken farms.

Zillow does not know the difference. And further, it does not know the difference between rural property and city property. Since it cannot even differentiate between the two, its very premise is flawed.

 

[Alsie35]

If you look at Realtor.com, most properties in areas with data will have 3 different AVM-projected values. The gap between those 3 models is pretty wide in most cases - which tells you all you need to know about AVMs and their reliability.

 

[Fernando]

If you look at Realtor.com, most properties in areas with data will have 3 different AVM-projected values. The gap between those 3 models is pretty wide in most cases - which tells you all you need to know about AVMs and their reliability.

I never used Realtor.com. Terrible site for AVM. Rather sad that Zillow took over as Valuation "Expert".