Zillow Faces Lawsuit Over 'Zestimate' Tool That Calculates a House's Worth (washingtonpost.com) 231
According to The Washington Post, "a homeowner has filed suit against online reality giant Zillow, claiming the company's controversial 'Zestimate' tool repeatedly undervalued her house, creating a 'tremendous road block' to its sale." From the report: The suit, which may be the first of its kind, was filed in Cook County Circuit Court by a Glenview, Ill., real estate lawyer, Barbara Andersen. The suit alleges that despite Zillow's denial that Zestimates constitute "appraisals," the fact that they offer market-value estimates and "are promoted as a tool for potential buyers to use in assessing [the] market value of a given property," shows that they meet the definition of an appraisal under state law. Not only should Zillow be licensed to perform appraisals before offering such estimates, the suit argues, but it also should obtain "the consent of the homeowner" before posting them online for everyone to see. In an interview, Andersen told me she is considering bringing the issue to the Illinois attorney general because it affects all property owners in the state. She has also been approached about turning the matter into a class action, which could touch millions of owners across the country. In the suit, Andersen said that she has been trying to sell her townhouse, which overlooks a golf course and is in a prime location, for $626,000 -- roughly what she paid for it in 2009. Houses directly across the street but with greater square footage sell for $100,000 more, according to her court filing. But Zillow's automated valuation system has apparently used sales of newly constructed houses from a different and less costly part of town as comparables in valuing her townhouse, she says. The most recent Zestimate is for $562,000. Andersen is seeking an injunction against Zillow and wants the company to either remove her Zestimate or amend it. For the time being, she is not seeking monetary damages, she told me.
reality giant (Score:2)
Let me see, would that be Oculus?
Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
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To fix this, "take ownership" of your property on Zillow and edit the property details and add an extra 1,000 sqft to it. Magically your value will go up. Thats what I did 5 years ago!
Maybe have to be careful that your property taxes don't go up because of this...!?
Re:Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
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Not sure how it works by you, but by us (Cook County, IL) there's a fleet of property tax lawyers you pay $50 to to get your property taxes appealed and lowered. They handle the paperwork to file the appeal and then they take the first year's savings. You pretty much always get a lower appraisal and rate. You repeat this process every 3 years when the tax appraisals are redone.
It's a total racket, the appraisals are arbitrarily high specifically to account for this. My house's appraisal went up 30% this
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Which will probably trick their algorithms into increasing their estimate of your neighbors' properties.
Take Ownership! (Score:5, Insightful)
Take ownership of the property on Zillow and at least put in the correct details. Zillow doesn't even have the square footage of the apartment; of course it's Zestimate is going to be worthless. There are no details other than it is a 3 bedroom 3 bath townhouse. This is one dumb real estate agent.
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While there are probably all manner of fraudulent behaviors which can help you sell a house for more if you don't get caught, it's probably better to just be truthful.
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It isn't fraud [to put in incorrect details in your favor].
The English language begs to differ.
Fraud: wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.
Whether or not you could be prosecuted for it under US law doesn't change the fact that it is fraud. Fraud is not just a legal term. Although even though IANAL, intentionally altering details about your home on online real estate sites for the purpose of financial gain sounds like false representation to me.
Re: Take Ownership! (Score:2, Insightful)
I strongly suspect that you aren't actually qualified to opine, or make authoritative statements, on matters of law. I'm sure your ego is to fail to admit this, so this post is written with the intent of informing others. I also, strongly, suspect that you'll actively reject being informed. You needn't respond, my time is better used elsewhere.
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When I file taxes, it's through a website too.
Does that make it legal to alter them for my favor?
I mean they make me promise I'm telling the truth when I do my taxes, but so does zillow when I take ownership.
Smarter to admit it's fraud, but untraceable, and you only made it more accurate (aside from the square footage).
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Case in point, the link for "I don't agree" just sets you up with one of their business associates to do a professional appraisal, which you'll then have to pay for, and they'll get a kick back (err, "referral fee").
Bumped your listing 1K in size (why not). The listing description still lists the original square footage. No fraud here other than the bogus estimates Zillow is doing.
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I didn't even know there was a way to tell Zillow the level of finish in your house, just the square footage and other objective measures. Even when the Zestimate is fairly accurate, I have never seen it take into account how nice the finish of the house is. The Zestimate often does a good job of estimating the price of a home with average finishes for the area, and then you need to do your own adjustment based on how much renovations have been done or need to be done.
I for instance bought my home for nearl
1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014 (Score:2)
Re:1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014 (Score:5, Funny)
You'd think that they'd filter out buildings like that.
Especially with undesirable tenants living there.
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Dead petunias in CA... (Score:5, Interesting)
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A roommate and I rented the front unit of a triplex in Silicon Valley after the dot com bust. I had planted some petunias in the front yard, got busy with life, and let the petunias die. While we were out in front one day, a little old lady came up to tell us that the dead petunias in our front yard lowered the value of her house down the street by $25K. I asked her if she was selling her house. She said no. I asked her how she knew that the value of her house dropped by $25K if it wasn't up for sale. She walked away in a huff.
These are the kind of stories I want to read!
Re:Dead petunias in CA... (Score:5, Interesting)
That seems about as accurate a method as Zillow. I bought a house several years back (well after the big crash) for a bit more than Zillow's supposed "estimate." But the price seemed right given improvements to the interior that Zillow's broad brush algorithm wouldn't know about.
Six months later, out of curiosity I somehow ended up on Zillow's site and looked up my house. The estimate, which was already undervalued, dropped by over 10%. Zillow lets an owner post an alternate estimate of value, so I noted the professional appraisal done before my purchase was significantly higher. A couple years go by, and Zillow keeps dropping the value of the house, even though houses in the neighborhood kept selling for similar $/sqft to what I paid. At the lowest point, Zillow's estimate was about 30% lower than the house was appraised... Even after I had provided that info.
I was so confused about all this that I signed up for an email alert just to see what might happen. Suddenly one day there's a flurry of activity looking at my house (even though it wasn't listed for sale). And suddenly overnight the estimate is bumped up by $50,000, then more. But the weirder thing is that Zillow displays a graph of what it claims were the historical "Zestimates" for the property over the last 5 years or whatever -- and that graph was suddenly altered to erase the inexplicable and continuous drop in value that it had previously registered. So Zillow not only made huge mistakes, but they completely hid them as if they had never happened.
Anyhow, less than a year after Zillow's value went back up inexplicably, I sold the house for quite a bit more than even Zillow's revised estimates (and made a reasonable profit, even though Zillow claimed my home value was going down for the vast majority of my time in the house).
This was an old house in a very established neighborhood, and there were no rapid swings in value there, even when the crash happened. So, given my personal experience, I'd say Zillow deserves this lawsuit -- as a new homebuyer, I definitely paid attention to those estimates, but now I know firsthand that they can be complete BS. And Zillow will clearly hide the fact that they even made a major valuation error.
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Maybe within +/-30 or 40%, and at that point, why bother posting them at all?
Because the unwashed masses uses Zillow as a starting point in their discussions about real estate values. If the realtor doesn't know about Zillow, they will find a realtor who does. Zilliow can make or break a realtor.
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Then again, home valuation is a necessarily arbitrary thing, and even professional home appraisers can be COLOSSALLY full of shit.
Dig into it a little, and you'll find gross inconsistencies in practices and an unwillingness to even explain their arcana - particularly when they're actually thrown to their own devices and don't have 'comps' that are anywhere close.
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I learned to mistrust Zillow long ago. We bought just at the start of the housing crash, and I watched Zillow push up prices on our place for two years even while everything was falling apart.
More recently, I looked again out of curiosity, at the chart where they track three values: county, city, and your home. The graphs for both the county and the city had smooth, gentle upward slopes across several years, basically in lock step. In the same time, their estimate for our house, which had matched that trend
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Seriously, if you lived next door (not "down the street") and I was selling my house, it would be something to consider. (If you tried to do anything to take advantage that smells like blackmail, the baseball bats come out).
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Let her tend the petunias, then.
My roommate's mother plucked the petals to make potpourri. I wasn't thrilled to come home find the flower petals in a bowl.
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Offer to tend the petunias yourself for $12.5k
Everyone is a winner.
Zillow isn't accurate, but buyers don't rely on it (Score:4, Insightful)
1) I agree that Zillow is not accurate. It consistently mis-priced my condo for a long time. Among other things, it doesn't account for the quality of the interior at all. Nor does it properly take into account 'equivalents', which in NYC may be restricted to other condos in a specific building, and not include condos across the street.
2) I also agree that Zillow should have a better 'user complaint' form, specifically if a licensed appraiser submits a value, they should willingly replace their estimate with it.
3) But requiring them to be licensed is silly.
4) Also, no serious buyer would use the Zillow price rather than a price a Realtor suggested. Realtors know about the issues in #1 and account for it. At most you will be eliminating those people too cheap to use a realtor.
This is not going to reduce your price sold by more than 3%, and is unlikely to increase it either (unless you get someone not using a realtor who is also foolish enough to ignore the licensed appraisal.)
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Also, no serious buyer would use the Zillow price rather than a price a Realtor suggested.
Realtors aren't any better. They exist to maximize their profits and minimize their costs. I have yet to meet a Realtor whose best interests align with mine. They're almost as bad as the Nigerian scammers, but not quite.
Bogus (Score:3)
That said, I kind of hate how Kelly Blue Book dictates the price of the entire auto resale market, so yes, all appraisals should be abolished. It's hard to do though in a market of non-fungible items, like houses, where there is no fully objective way to compare one house to another.
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KBB hardly dictates the price of the entire auto resale market. I've only ever found one seller in my entire driving history willing to come down to KBB prices, and that was a close friendly coworker at a car-centric job, and even that was a hard negotiation. Basically nobody is willing to accept "just blue book" for a used car in my experience.
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The invisible hand of the market functions only on the condition of all parties being well informed, and since KBB is compiled from actual market data (what cars are actually selling for) all it's doing is informing all parties and making that invisible hand work more efficiently.
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Oh come now. It's a used car. The most-efficient mode of operation would be for it to sell based on its usable lifetime adjusted for maintenance costs relative to its passed lifetime. The rest is just imaginary valuation.
New goods sell based on their cost. Cost is wages. If you cut labor-hours required to make things by 50%, they cost half as much; add the same profit margins on top at every level of supply and you get ... half the price. People are working the same hours, so they still have the sam
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That's not how markets work. It's how an ideal, perfectly efficient market would be forced to work, but it's not how real world markets with all their inefficiencies actually work. Every seller of everything is always trying to get the highest price; every buyer of everything is always trying to get the lowest price; and the prices they end up agreeing on are based on the next-best alternatives (that they know about). In some markets, like say commodities markets (trading large volumes of fungible goods bet
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Every seller of everything is always trying to get the highest price; every buyer of everything is always trying to get the lowest price; and the prices they end up agreeing on are based on the next-best alternatives (that they know about).
In production, the lowest price that can sustain a product's existence is the cost. That's wages and cost of risk; a supply chain piles up some wages for extra overhead and risks that wouldn't exist in a vertical monopoly, and also nudges the price up by intermediate profits, although those profit margins get slim as hell in the supply chain (e.g. GM has orders for millions of tons of steel per year; they get a much, much slimmer margin that someone buying thousands of tonnes of steel could ever hope for,
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In negotiation, published standards of fairness give you a hell of a lot of weight.
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In a depressed market, the seller can argue they paid some amount for the house some years ago. You then have the nebulous argument that the market is down some, so they give you -$20k instead of -$150k. The seller really doesn't want to take 1/3 depreciation on their asset, and can point to their purchase price as a standard; with a depressed market, you can point to a market trend and a published standard of similar properties as justification of the huge depreciation.
A buyer willing to pay will be l
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From what I gather, market prices in different regions vary, and KBB seems to list overall market prices. I live somewhere that lots of things (especially, back on topic, housing) is overpriced, so cars probably generally sell for more here too, while you likely live somewhere the opposite is true.
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I've only found one way to get a decent price from a dealer. It depends on you needing just a 'transportation special'.
Wait until the wholesale auction car mover shows up, then go to the backlot, find a wholesale car that's acceptable and offer them $50 more than the minimum bid (which will be posted in the car window).
They won't take it initially, point out how much hauling costs and auction commissions are, say 'tick tock' and point out that you aren't buying another car from them if the car goes on
Amazing it took this long (Score:2)
It amazes me that someone didnt sue them years ago for this.
There's no way a website can generata an accurate estimate for your house, but people will beleive the figure they post or at least use it as a guideline so ts its inevitably gonna be harder to convince potential buyers that zillow in fact fucked up rather than you are overvaluing it.
I'd go as far as to say that their estimates are basically self-fulfilling prophecies that can easily hurt both buyers and sellers in the pocket by skewing the market
A much better way (Score:2)
Zestimates are pointless and hurt Zillow (Score:2)
Zestimates are pointless because everyone except for absolute newbies to the real estate market knows they are completely wrong. Newbies will rapidly become educated - no, sorry, that ramshackle house your mom willed to you in the wilds of some depressed former coal mining region isn't worth $750,000 when literally every other home being sold near there is going for 1/10th that.
Further, Zillow re-writes history when Zestimates change - there's an historical graph they have that doesn't remotely match what t
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The Zestimate is a 2-dimensional value. They're trying to display the market valuation of the house over time, not their valuation of the house at different points in time. A graph of the actual Zestimate history would be a one-dimensional value tracked in a two-dimensional graph.
Not even close to an appraisal. (Score:2)
The most important distinction being that a CMA is not an official determination of value, it's a non-bindin
Whut (Score:2)
She's blaming Zillow for her woes is she ? Zillow has some usefulness, but is far from a total ( or accurate ) picture of why a home price is what it is.
What's next ? Folks going to go after Edmunds True Car Value or Kelly Blue Book because they feel they're undervaluing their cars ? :|
It's a third party ESTIMATE based on an algorithm for fucks sake.
You want to know what counts ? The folks that actually appraise your home periodically to set your tax rate. ( I highly doubt they rely on Zillow data btw
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Welcome to the club (Score:2)
I have no idea how they calculate my home's value, but it's obviously not based on direct comps from recent sales around here. The square foot price that they're using is about 10% lower than what I would easily get. To be fair, home prices have risen by something like 30% in the last 3 years since I bought it, and it looks like zestimate doesn't handle this sort of market very well.
zillow is a joke, (multiproperty deed error) (Score:2)
What's next? (Score:2)
What about website/domain name value estimators? They also pull a seemingly-random number out of a hat, disagreeing with each other by 1000% or more, and no doubt impact what a buyer is willing to pay. Yet it's hard to see how it would be in the public interest to outlaw all machine-generated estimates.
It's an estimate (Score:2)
I treat the Zillow estimate the same way as a budgetary quote for customers, it's+-30%. Using the 30% number her townhome fall's well within the range of the margin of error. If you want a real estimate pay to have a person to come look at your house and put a value on it, they are called restate agents.
Zestimate can be contested (Score:2)
There's a giant "I disagree with this Zestimate" right under the Zestimate. It allows you to offer a real appraisal (which generally costs money -- in Northern California it's around $400) through an agent.
And the Zestimate is going to go up and down, just like any other estimate. If the house next to yours sells for $100,000 less than you might have thought, your house will likely drop in value. Your house might sell for a lot more, but the value will drop regardless as neighborhoods count towards your
Zillow is worthless (Score:2)
By the time a house pops up on zillow its already sold, I know cause I was in them a week or more before. Their square footage is almost always wrong and their estimate's are just random guesses.
When I bought my house last year it took about a day of looking at zillow to know its absolute worthless bullshit
Zillow *undervaluing*? That's new (Score:2)
The last time I was looking at them, between '10 and '12, 100% of the time they *massively* OVERVALUED the properties, and sizes.
Data: my real estate agent Chicago (which, btw, is Cook Co), did her due dilligence in '03. Zillow claimed that, at the time, it was worth 20% more. They lied.
I looked at the house I bought in Montgomery Co, MD, in '11. They claimed it had something like 500^2 *more* than it does (and was worth more than I paid).
They're crooks. Refin, on the other hand, seems to give *reasonable*
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Other side of the spectrum (Score:2)
Zillow showed my house as being worth so much that we started the paperwork with our mortgage broker to get cash out (we wanted to finish the basement). The mortgage broker confirmed Zillow's valuation as "a good faith estimate" but required an actual appraisal.. The official appraisal (which cost us $500) came back nearly half of what Zillow estimated, and based on how much we still owed we didn't qualify. I wanted to sue Zillow for their misleading estimate but thought that what they did wasn't actionable
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I have no idea who is in charge of the algorithm, but it's about as useful as using the tax assessor's value for your house as the market price, and I've never seen it get any better yet.
A lawsuit, though? SNORE
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In our area, Zillow tends to be really high, especially for homes in the $500K-$1M range. As much as 20% above what homes sell for. What's kind of bizarre is that the Zillow algorithm doesn't appear to heavily weigh what actually happens to specific homes. So if a zestimate for a given home is for $800K, the owners put the house on the market for $800K and then over the course of several months drop the price until it sells for $650K, the zestimate following closing is still likely to be almost $800K.
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Zillow is crap and their estimates are hugely flawed. Have seen them value homes that just sold for more than 20% less. Their algorithms are hokum.
But, it's a great way to get stupid buyers to the table. They want the house, and will always pay more if you know how to negotiate.
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The Zestimate values my home at ~80k more than it's "worth" and I've seen it climb to 250% of the purchase price in the last few months (there is/was a bubble that peaked some time between February and April). The estimates are based not just on local data but also on the national housing market. It's a fairly decent algorithm but by no means complete.
The problem is that we're currently in a housing bubble so I could probably sell my house for ~20-30k more than what I bought it for a few years ago and I saw
Re:Nobody believes the Zestimates (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a fairly decent algorithm but by no means complete
Their algorithm is smoke and mirrors.
I bought my house in 2013 for $235k. I would get an e-mail from them every other month or so, saying "your zestimate increased/decreased, here is the new one". I have a few of those e-mails still hanging around my inbox, the latest was from February of this year, saying my Zestimate was now at $315. A month ago my neighbor listed his house, for about $279, my Zestimate mysteriously dropped to 289, and the history never comes anywhere near the $315.
Now, I know they have the right to change their Zestimate, it is their site after all, but why the unabashed altering of their own historical data? That part doesn't make sense.
Re:Nobody believes the Zestimates (Score:5, Funny)
i'll offer you $400 for the house
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They are a very crude tool using broad, flawed algorithms.
Indeed. They just grab sales records from county clerk websites, and do quick comparisons that are often wildly inaccurate. For instance, a lakefront or oceanfront home often has "comparables" that are on the other side of the street where prices are half as much.
Zestimates are just ballpark numbers that nobody takes very seriously.
Re:Nobody believes the Zestimates (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, so they suck. Should they be censored over it? Because this is what is being demanded.
Re:Nobody believes the Zestimates (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nobody believes the Zestimates (Score:5, Interesting)
The argument is a Zestimate is a type of appraisal. And appraisals have legal requirements that must be met.
That's a rather odd argument. No one looks at the house, or goes inside. the neighbor posting on Facebook that they think the house should be valued less would be as equal a lawsuit target.
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Zillow makes money by saying "Your home is worth this much". That's why people visit the site, so that's how Zillow is able to make money.
If Zillow isn't doing due diligence on those appraisals, they have indeed caused financial harm.
So your defense of the argument is financial? Okay - does the person have legal recourse if Zillow posts anything that can be considered negative? How about if they value a house too high, and no one looks at the house. Or a potential customer is pissed because Zillow "wasted their time" when they went to see the place.
How about if a house doesn't have the square footage as reported by the county real estate entries? This happened to us when we bought our house.
The appraised value of a house is the a
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If I claim I'm not a doctor and then tell you you have a certain illness, am I practicing medicine?
If I claim I'm not a lawyer and draft up a legal document for you, am I practicing law?
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US law already disagrees on both counts.
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And what exactly led you to believe the claims that Zestimate is an appraisal? And besides, the header here says "Nobody believes the Zestimates", so what is the problem?
Oh, perhaps it could be THE FUCKING DEFINITION OF "APPRAISAL"!?!?! [dictionary.com]
2. an estimate of value, as for sale, assessment, or taxation; valuation.
Sheesh.
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And what exactly led you to believe the claims that Zestimate is an appraisal? And besides, the header here says "Nobody believes the Zestimates", so what is the problem?
Oh, perhaps it could be THE FUCKING DEFINITION OF "APPRAISAL"!?!?! [dictionary.com]
2. an estimate of value, as for sale, assessment, or taxation; valuation.
Sheesh.
FWIW - Zillow explicitly says: "The Zestimate is just a starting point. Let us connect you with someone who can give you a professional evaluation." They also say that their Zestimate can be wrong if they don't have the right information and home owners that claim a properly on Zillow can edit the "Facts" about the property to update the information.
However, every realtor I've ever discussed says right out that Zillow shouldn't be trusted. IOW, if the person filing the suit is really in the real estate i
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Okay, so they suck. Should they be censored over it? Because this is what is being demanded.
It does seem like a unofficial estimate would fall squarely under the "opinion" label.
It would also open the door for people to sue real appraisers or even the realtor if they don't like the estimate they get. This isn't likely to go anywhere.
Re:Nobody believes the Zestimates (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the question is whether they should be regulated. Appraisals have specific regulations, so if people are using this service in lieu of actual appraisal services...
To me, this seems a bit like Uber claiming "we're not a taxi service" while blatantly offering a slightly different sort of taxi service. Just because they claim "this isn't an appraisal service" doesn't mean it actually *isn't* an appraisal service. They may end up winning if there's a legal definition of "appraisal" that they don't match, of course. I really don't know enough about appraisals or this case to have much of an opinion.
Re:Nobody believes the Zestimates (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the question is whether they should be regulated. Appraisals have specific regulations, so if people are using this service in lieu of actual appraisal services...
To me, this seems a bit like Uber claiming "we're not a taxi service" while blatantly offering a slightly different sort of taxi service. Just because they claim "this isn't an appraisal service" doesn't mean it actually *isn't* an appraisal service. They may end up winning if there's a legal definition of "appraisal" that they don't match, of course. I really don't know enough about appraisals or this case to have much of an opinion.
An actual appraisal does require a certified appraiser, at least in some situations: "All states require appraisers to be state licensed or certified in order to provide appraisals to federally regulated lenders. Some states require appraisers to be licensed or certified to provide appraisals for other parties as well." http://www.appraisalinstitute.... [appraisalinstitute.org]
This seems to me a bit like suing a website that provides free legal advice with the caveat that they are not lawyers so their advice has no legal standing.
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Uber's a bad example, because they're more like a limo service than a taxi service. It's all about how hails and street pickups work that defines the difference.
Re:Nobody believes the Zestimates (Score:4, Interesting)
Comparables are always up for debate.
We went through this financing a remodel for our house in 2003. The original appraisal was flawed in our opinion because while the structures were comparable, they all lacked the location feature of our house -- no rear neighbors, and adjacent to a 50 acre wooded lake.
The appraiser admitted that his comps were flawed -- there 4 other lakes in the city were larger, and all the homes on those lakes were mansions worth millions, so they wouldn't work as comps, and there were too few recent home sales on our lake for comparison.
The lender eventually got the appraiser to work harder at finding similar structures with scenic natural overlooks and we gained meaningful increases in appraisal. Fortunately for us, the lender would have lost the loan without the appraisal change, so they had an incentive to pressure the appraiser and accept it in underwriting.
People in suburban subdivisions are kind of fucked on appraisals, as there's little differentiation. Their house really is worth what any 4 recent sales in the same area are worth because the homes and settings are nearly all alike.
But people with unusual geographic features are also kind of fucked unless they insist that those unique features be accounted for.
Re:Nobody believes the Zestimates (Score:4, Insightful)
To me this reads as a homeowner over valueing their home (I saw this a lot when shopping FSBO trying to save). The houses across the street are selling, this home owner is missing something about why theirs is not. They are blaming the zestimate instead. Just like when I was shopping, and people were comparing their house to slightly smaller but nicely remodeled homes to their old carpet sad kitchen ones.
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I recently had my property re-appraised so I could do a re-fi... in 2003, it appraised for $189k, since then, we've remodeled the kitchen and rebuilt our bathroom, enclosed out porch, added a deck, and 2 years ago, replaced the roof (also new water heater, furnace and AC). The appraiser, somehow, came up with the EXACT same value as Zillow, which was $136k. Two hours after she submitted the appraisal, a Realtor called us about selling our house. It seems we are not the first person this appraiser has done t
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It's as valid as me opining about the health impacts
As well-worded as the rest of your post was, I thought it right to point out that this should read "my opining" (gerund, noun, possessive). it seems you have the inclination and ability to produce readable prose; and I admire that greatly, particularly for an AC. But that does make the few mistakes stand out even more clearly.
Keep up the good work!
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My bank insisted on an appraisal as part of the loan process. It was effectively part of the cost of taking out the loan.
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AC has obviously never bought a house and should shut the fuck up.
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If you want a real appraisal, hire an appraiser.
I think you over-estimate, several key things, for any given home buyer. a) disposable income to just, 'hire', an appraiser. - Most people can barely qualify for a home loan. And you want people to shell out a hundred, few hundred on a 'maybe'.. ?
My official appraisal cost $500. I paid that begrudgingly because based on Zillow's estimate I could qualify for over $100k cash out and still be within the bank's magic loan amount being no more than 85% of the appraised value.
b) Zillow is a tool for rough estimation on property availability. - If anyone is using it for anything more than that, well, they're rather stupid. Or, they live in urban, high population settings, where the market is skewed because of Zillow, RedFin, etc...
My mortgage broker took Zillow's estimate at face value for a good faith estimate (no, I didn't give the broker Zillow's numbers). It was this good faith estimate which convinced me to pay $500 for an official appraisal.
As someone who has been tracking reality websites for the past several months, Zillow, Redfin, Landwatch, and the like are starting points to availability. As I'm looking to buy, if one actually becomes a viable fine, I'm finding the actual realtor handling the property. Not a fucking website...
Ah, you're talking buying, my experience was with refinance.
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Re:Nothing to see here, just another housing bubbl (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nothing to see here, just another housing bubbl (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or maybe people don't want to live in your neighborhood.
Or maybe all the cigarette and pot smokers moved out because federal law applies to the apartment complex and smokers have to go outside the gates to smoke.
Or maybe they earn $50k as an IT contractor in Silicon Valley and can't afford it.
For an extra $200 per month, I could get an additional wall to have a one-bedroom apartment.
Re:Nothing to see here, just another housing bubbl (Score:5, Interesting)
Or maybe all the cigarette and pot smokers moved out because federal law applies to the apartment complex and smokers have to go outside the gates to smoke.
There is no such law. An apartment manager might tell you that just to get you to cooperate, but there's no actual law requiring that. However, as per the Fair Housing Act, if one tenant has breathing problems and another nearby tenant smokes, they can force the smoking tenant to move to another unit and/or move out of the complex entirely. If the landlord doesn't comply and doesn't forcibly move that tenant, they can get sued.
The apartment I used to live in had rules requiring that all smoking happen off premises, which was just their own bylaw that you had to agree to when you signed your lease. However, the one I live at now doesn't; they just have to be in certain designated areas.
No matter what though, in the event of any kind of dispute, the law (rightfully, IMO) tends to discriminate against the smoker's civil rights if they conflict with that of a nonsmoker's civil rights.
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However, as per the Fair Housing Act, if one tenant has breathing problems and another nearby tenant smokes, they can force the smoking tenant to move to another unit and/or move out of the complex entirely.
What the situation could be since the apartment complex is covered by the Fair Housing Act (federal law), CA-legal pot smoking isn't allowed. If the pot smokers have to go outside the gates, the cigarette smokers have to go outside the gates as well.
Re:Nothing to see here, just another housing bubbl (Score:5, Interesting)
There's also insurance issues.
Apartments that totally ban smoking get discounts on it, since they've banned a major source of fires.
Smoking bans are generally market based, not law based.
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Do they use them for AirBnB?
Funny you should mentioned that. My apartment complex announced that they have guest apartments available for short-term rentals. I don't think they're doing AirBnB yet.
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I disagree, especially once you take property tax valuation into account (which may also be higher than this ZEstimate thingy.)
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...towards sellers, not buyers.
That certainly explains why Zillow is undervaluing this person's house they are trying to sell... because they are biased in favor of sellers....yes. Makes perfect sense.