Automated home valuation web sites offer the promise of a free market value for your home without the hassle of having an agent spend hours of your time during a free CMA presentation. I think they are great, and more than a little addictive once your start logging into the site and popping in the addresses of any home you are curious about.
Best of all they portend to give you the monthly fluctuations in graph form and will even email you letting you know how much your home has gone up or down in the last 30 days. Pretty miraculous wouldn't you say? The last email I recall from Zillow said my house went up $26,ooo over the previous 30 days. Cool! I felt like celebrating. When it actually comes to determining what the actual market value of your home is are you willing to leave it to a web site to make the determination? If so, which site? Zillow.com, Cyberhomes.com, and EAppraisal.com all give you automated valuations on their sites.
I recently had a customer who was obsessed with Zillow. With every fluctuation I heard about Zillow this and Zillow that. Just for kicks I put the address into the 3 sites to see what values came up. Zillow came in at $588,500. Cyberhomes came in at $546,062. EAppraisal came in at $487,226, and last but not least the county's 2010 assessment is $394,000. Of the valuation web sites there is a $101,276 spread which is much more than a statistical insignificance. I tried this for a few other addresses and got similar results.
For home buyers and homeowners these are fun and interesting sites to visit. Check out your neighbors, and friends or whomever. When you really need to get down to a real valuation there's no substitute for the opinion of an experienced Realtor who knows your neighborhood.
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