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Say It Ain’t So Zillow

I don’t mean to bash Zillow but they make it so easy sometimes.

Last time I checked, real estate prices in Big Bear are not going up. So you can imagine my surprise when I received an email last week from Zillow saying the Zestimate (read:value) for a rental property I own went up a staggering $20,000, or 11.4%, in the past 30 days.  Huh?

Not a big deal, I am in the business and know what is really going on.

But I also received a call from a seller client about his property Zestimate going up $30,000, 11.5%, in the past month.  I can hear you laughing right now.  I was.  The client wasn’t though. His home has been on the market the whole year with many people & agents thinking it is overpriced and then he gets this.

It is the little things like this that make me lose confidence in Zillow, and evaluation sites like them. They are rarely right.  I don’t know many people who think the Zillow Zestimates are even close to the correct value when it comes to properties in Big Bear.

Seems to me if I was telling people this kind of stuff (read:garbage) I wouldn’t be in business very long nor would I have many clients.

I guess their advertisers must be happy with them.

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Comments

  1. Tyler,
    Hopefully would-be buyers read that and perceive your listing as a great value!

  2. Always thinking positively Holly. To me, I just lose confidence in anything Zillow has to say.

  3. The problem is many consumers don’t understand how Zillow and the AVMs work. Result: a zestimate is one more obstacle for professionals to deal with when discussing value and pricing with clients.

  4. Totally agree with that.

    Tough part is that we are only reaching them one by one a lot of times, when Zillow and the other AVM models seem to reach them in much larger numbers. If all real estate pros understood this, and discussed it with their clients, then it might not be an obstacle at all.

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