My clients are always telling me what they think their house is worth, and come to find out, they most often cite the Zillow Zestimate value they saw online. I don't know about you, but in the last 30 days, I have seen Zestimate drops of up to 9% in one month! Now that's crazy, no house changes price that fast, this isn't the stock market!
Now they don't just pull these values out of nowhere, they are using automated valuation appraisal methods that aggregate enormous amounts of data continuously to come up with a specific home's Zestimate.
Zillow Zestimates don't take into account how a particular home is improved, or the condition of that home. Their program cannot evaluate views or street noise, or any number of the idiosyncracies that can swing a property's value one direction or the other. They readily admit that the accuracy of their Zestimates is only within 5% of the sales price 34% of the time in King County, WA.
They are within 10% of the sales price 58% of the time, and within 20% just 82% of the time. The accuracy figures for Pierce and Snohomish Counties are pretty similar to King County. Zillow's accuracy figures vary by county and they track 99% of the homes in the market.
As much as our market conditons have changed in the last 4 years, it has been a more challenging task to place correct value on a property. We are up to that task, call on us if we can help unscramble some of the confusion!
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