Zillow is a great idea.
Be able to value every house in America. Just type in your address and it
will give you a Zestimate, an estimation of what your home is worth.
It's kind of like Google. They have a secret computer
algorithm the pulls data from a variety of sources and spits out a value.
But how good are their numbers?
They make it seem like they are very precise. They give
values in $500 increments. They send you an email every month with updated
pricing. It makes you believe that they are pretty reliable.
I figured it was easy enough to do a quick analysis in my local
market of Sandy Springs. I took
the last 12 sales for the past month and compared the Zestimates with what the
home actually sold for. After all, the sales price is the only real
indicator of value at any particular time. It's a willing buyer giving
real cash to a willing seller.
Here is my spreadsheet:
Look at that error range in column C. Zillow was under the
actual price by as much as 72% and was above the actual sales price by as much
as 38%. They were off on average
by 23%.
Think about that for a second. That's a pretty big error
range. For a $400,000 home, a 23% error range is from $308,000 to
$492,000.
If you actually dig around the Zillow site,
you'll find a page where they actually show their
own
studies on their accuracy. In Atlanta they say that their Median Error
is 8.8%.
They break it down in different ways.
By their numbers, 24.4% of Zestimates
are off by more than 20%,
It is a computer-generated
estimate of the worth of a house today, given the available data.
Our data sources may be incomplete
or incorrect;
we have not physically inspected a
specific home
does not consider all the market
intricacies that can determine the actual price a house will sell for.
When it comes to unique homes
(e.g., luxury mansions, unusual designs) we are less accurate in our
Zestimates.
Zillow does have some nice charts of historic prices by zip code
and area. Maybe the exact prices are off but the general trends seem to be
pretty accurate. You can go back up to 10 years.
Listing status is also not updated very often.
It gets frustrating when I work with buyers
who insist on using Zillow as their primary search tool. I'll send them
listings and then they'll send me a list of homes that weren't on my list and
they ask me why I didn't include them. When I look them up, they'll come
up as "pending sale" or "expired" or even "sold". I've seen some homes
that were sold several months ago still showing up as "available" in Zillow.
At first, a buyer gets excited thinking that they have found a special home that
no one else knows about only to find out that it's a listing that Zillow hasn't
updated the status for yet. So beware of this. Zillow is pretty and
it is presents very nicely but please be aware of its short comings.
Our market area is in the
north metro Atlanta area.
We service Cobb County,
north Fulton County, Dekalb
County, Forsyth County and
Gwinnett County. We
are very familiar with Sandy
Springs, Dunwoody, Marietta,
Roswell, Alpharetta,
Buckhead, and Midtown.
We have sold homes inside
the perimeter and outside
the perimeter. We
can't know everything so for
clients who want to look for
property in Peachtree City,
Newnan, Stone Mountain,
Douglasville, Macon and
areas further out we will
gladly recommend a good
agent who specializes in
those areas.
We help buyers negotiate
with builders for
residential new construction
houses. New houses in
Atlanta are hot right now.
We can represent you in the
purchase of your new house
built by any of the
following builders: Torrey
Homes, MDC Homes, Centex
Homes, Pulte Homes, Morrison
Homes, Ryland Homes, John
Wieland Homes, Winmark
Homes, Meridian Homes, John
Willis Homes, Benchmark
Homes and many more home
builders.
We can help clients find
short term apartments for
rent but normally we don't
work with clients who are
just looking for rentals.
We do help clients find
Atlanta condos. We can
also help you purchase HUD
homes in Atlanta. We
are an authorized agent with
them and have the HUD key to
get into HUD homes. We
have access to foreclosure
homes that banks want to
sell.
We love showing executive
homes and luxury homes. We
always like to know how
people find our site.
Send us an email and tell us
which search term you used.
Some terms that we might be
found by are realty Atlanta,
Ga homes, Atlanta realty,
condos Atlanta, Atlanta
realestate, Atlanta
property, houses Atlanta,
Atlanta realtors, Ga houses,
or realtors Atlanta.
Maybe you found us by typing
in Atlanta MLS listings, or
Atlanta MLS search, or MLS
Atlanta GA. Hopefully we
don't come up under nursing
homes or funeral homes.
It is always amazing to me
how the Internet can allow
total strangers to find each
other and build new business
relationships. It
truly is becoming a small,
interconnected world.
