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Nothing, but that would require them hiring an appraiser on each transaction, which would be humbling for them to have to do (and while biased as an appraiser m
by Otternonsenz 5y ago
Nothing, but that would require them hiring an appraiser on each transaction, which would be humbling for them to have to do (and while biased as an appraiser myself, I would not trust anyone else other than a licensed appraiser to do that type of adjustment work, because it’s a daily part of our jobs).
Or they could have an internal team of appraisers doing that type of work, but the business might not like it when the appraisers don’t validate their pricing structure because real data does not support it.
- Breza 5y agoIt's wild that they didn't have human appraisers review at least a sample of the houses to groundtruth the algorithm.
- Otternonsenz 5y agoGreed and wanting to be ahead of others will blind you to truth standing right in your face. While everyday workers at Zillow didn’t have a say in company policy, you can’t tell me that the executives and project managers didn’t know what they were doing or why they were doing it. They didn’t want to be told their idea was bad or couldn’t work (which it did work until it didn’t) early on, so they got the debt they refused to pay through due diligence. And Zillow has been around for almost 20 years, so it’s not like they didn’t have awareness of how the home market works or how to validate pricing metrics. From the outside it fells like willful ignorance, but perhaps they suffer from the same ills any large company trying to “move fast and break things”.