Have any of y'all played around with Zillow.com? How do they determine property value? It claims my property is worth ~60% more than what I paid for it 3 years ago which I think is absurd.
they use comparables of recent action on the market. from what i've seen it's pretty accurate, but if you haven't been following recentl transactions i can see why it would look off. it's a guesstimate to your individual house, but it's a pretty good guess.
WSJ did a study of 1000 homes (actual sell price vs Zillow estimate) and found that the median difference between the Zillow estimate and the actual price was 7.8%.
I used them selling our place in CA, and my Mom's place in Austin. They were in the ballpark. They use recent sales data. The sparser the data, the more off they'll be. Don't make that your whole basis, but its a point of reference.
It doesn't that well for Texas because here you don't have to disclose what a property sold for. Its not public record. In a lot of states it is.
the formula is much more involved than simply comparables some states are far more accurate than others.
i've seen some way high and some way low and some pretty close. therefore, i stopped using them as a reference as i could not trust the accuracy or precision of them. it would be one thing if they were always low or always high and i could adjust for that, but they were all over the place.
Zillow's all over the place. It can be anywhere from 10-15% too low to 10-15% too high in my neighborhood. In the span of two weeks.
Zillow is not accurate in Texas. Many other states require that the sales price of a property to be disclosed, but Texas does not require it. So it is impossible to know the sales price of a given unless it is 1) reported to the MLS and 2) you can access the MLS data. I know some other sites take the original mortage balance (which is usually public record) and apply a multiple to it, but his is not very accurate. I know for a fact that Zillow is 100% inaccurate in my neighborhood in Dallas because it lists "recently sold" homes and their prices and I have a comps report from the MLS showing completely different (and accurate) prices.
