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Or you could have the situation a couple of blocks from me: 1920s remodel that was awesome in the inside sold for $850k. Crappy 1940s house with one owner for 4
by cwilkes 10y ago
Or you could have the situation a couple of blocks from me: 1920s remodel that was awesome in the inside sold for $850k. Crappy 1940s house with one owner for 40 years (and it shows) is Zestimated to be the same price as they have the same stats in square footage and bathrooms. They are listing for a reasonable $575k.
Zestimates are a complete joke. They can complain that they don't have all the facts (but they can infer from the wording of "needs work" and "recently remodeled") but that's like if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass a hopin.
What I don't get is that they have the data on millions of sales. Surely they can come up with something that's not 30% off. At that rate you minus well just guess at a price and be better off.
- marmshallow 10y ago> minus well I think you mean "might as well". I'm sure that Zillow has poured tremendous resources into one of their flagship features on the site and their model certainly takes into account all features you are thinking of.
- gwbas1c 10y agoBecause a more accurate estimate of value requires well-formed data. They would need a good way to judge condition and other characteristics that might require a very subtle interpretation of a listing, or might require an in-person visit to a property. These kinds of judgements are much more complicated than traditional machine learning. My guess is that they are feeding easily-obtained data into a machine learning algorithm, and quality of property, interpretation of a listing, and viewing of pictures, is not something that's easy to feed into a machine learning algorithm.